Islands in the Net (41 page)

The sea seemed to be boiling. She thought of sharks. Suddenly the opaque depths beneath her naked legs were full of lurking presences. She swam hard, until the panic strength faded into chilly shock. She turned and looked.

It was going. Stern last, rising above the sea in the last hissing remnants of flame, like a distant candlelit tombstone. She watched it for long, thudding heartbeat seconds. Then it was gone, sinking into nothingness, blackness, and ooze.

The night was overcast. Darkness came on like a shroud. The rush of afterwash hit her and bobbed her like a buoy.

Another hum overhead. Then, in the distance, in the darkness, the chatter of machine-gun fire.

They were killing the survivors in the water. Shooting them from drones, out of darkness, with infrareds. She began swimming again, desperately, away.

She couldn't die out here. No, not blown to shreds out here, killed like a statistic.… David, the baby …

An inflatable boat surged by, dark man-shapes and the quiet mutter of an engine. A slap in the water—someone had tossed her a line. She heard Hennessey's voice. “Grab it. Hurry up!”

She did it. It was that, or die here. They tugged her in and hauled her up, over the inflatable's hull. Hennessey grinned at her in his drenched clothes. He had companions: four sailors in white round hats, neat silky uniforms, dark with a gleam of gold.

She sprawled in the rippling bottom of the boat, against a hull black and slick as a gut, in her sari blouse and underwear. One of the sailors tossed the flotation ring overboard. They picked up speed, heading away, up the straits.

The closest sailor leaned toward her, an Anglo about forty. His face looked as white as a sliced apple. “Cigarette, lady?”

She stared at him. He leaned back, shrugging.

She coughed on seawater, then gathered her legs in, trembling, wretched. A long time passed. Then her brain began to work again.

The ship had never had a chance. Not even to scream out an SOS. The first missile had wiped out the bridge—radio, radar, and all. The killers had cut their throat first thing.

But to kill a hundred people in the middle of the Malacca Straits! To commit an atrocity like that—surely other ships must have seen the explosion, the smoke. To have done such a thing, so viciously, so blatantly …

Her voice, when she finally got it out, was cracked and weak. “Hennessey …?”

“Henderson,” he told her. He tugged his drenched red rain slicker over his head. Beneath it was a bright orange life jacket. Under that a sleeveless utility vest, bulges and little metal zips and Velcro flaps. “Here, put this slicker on.”

He shoved it at her. She held it numbly.

Henderson chuckled. “Put it on! You want to meet a hundred red-blooded sailors in wet underwear?”

The words didn't quite register, but she started on it anyway. They were speeding in darkness, the boat bouncing, the wind tearing and flapping at the raincoat. She struggled with it for what seemed an endless time. It clung to her bare wet skin like a bloody hide.

“Looks like you need a hand,” Henderson said. He crawled forward and helped her into it. “There. That's better.”

“You killed them all,” Laura croaked.

Henderson aimed amused glances at the sailors. “None of that, now,” he said loudly. “Besides, I had a little help from the attack ship!” He laughed.

Sailor number two cut back the engine. They were coasting forward in darkness. “Boat,” he said. “A sub is a ‘boat.' Sir.”

In the darkness, she heard water cascading and the gurgle of surf. She could barely see it in the dimness, a vague blue-black sheen. But she could smell it and feel it, almost taste it on her skin.

It was huge. It was close. A vast black rectangle of painted steel. A conning tower.

A monstrous submarine.

9

It was huge and alive, ticking over like some transatlantic jet, drizzling seawater with sharp pneumatic huffing and a deep shuddering hum. Laura heard drones hissing past her in the darkness, taxiing in to land on the hull. Evil, waspish sounds. She couldn't see them, but she knew the machines could see her, lit by her own body heat.

The inflatable collided gently with the sub, a rubbery jolt.

The sailors climbed a detachable rope ladder up the dark curving hull. Henderson waited as they left. Then he smeared wet hair from his eyes and grabbed her arm.

“Don't do stupid shit,” he told her. “Don't yell, don't act up, don't be a bitch. I saved your life. So don't embarrass me. Because you'll die.”

He sent her up the ladder ahead of him. The rungs hurt her hands, and the slick steel hull was deep-water-cold under her bare feet. The flattened hull stretched out endlessly into washing darkness. Behind her, the conning tower loomed thirty feet high. Long spines of black-and-white antennas sprouted from its peak.

A dozen more sailors clustered on the hull, in elegant bell-bottom trousers and long-sleeved blouses with gold-braided cuffs. They tended to the drones, manhandling them down a series of yawning hatches. They moved with a strange tippy-toeing, hunch-shouldered look. As if they found the empty night sky oppressive.

The inflatable's crew expertly hauled it up after them, flinging rope hand over hand. They deflated it, trampling out air in a demented sombrero dance, then stuffed the wet rubber mass into a seabag.

It was all over in a few moments. They were jumping back into their vast steel warren, like rats. Henderson hustled Laura over a hatch coaming onto a recessed floor. It sank beneath their feet. The hatch slammed over her head with an ear-popping huff and a squeal of hydraulics.

They emerged from the elevator shaft into a vast cylindrical warehouse lit with sullen yellow bulbs. It had two decks: a lower floor, beneath her bare feet, of solid iron, and an upper one of perforated grating. It was cavernous, two hundred feet long; every ten feet it was cut, left and right, by massive bulging elevator shafts. Shafts nine feet across, steel silos, their bases stuck with plugs and power cables. Like bio-tech tanks, she thought, big fermenters.

Two dozen sailors padded silently in foam-soled deck shoes on the narrow walkways between the silos. They were working on the drones in hushed concentration. An incense stink of hot aircraft oil and spent ammunition. Some scrambled vibe of war and industry and church.

The compartment was painted in sky blue, the tubes in spacy midnight indigo. Henderson headed aft. As he hauled her along, Laura touched the cold latex surface of a tube, wonderingly. Someone had painstakingly stenciled it with dizzy five-pointed stars, comets with whizzing comic-book tails, little yellow ringed Saturns. Like surfboard art. Dreamy and cheap.

Some silos had been welder-cut and hung with arcane repair tools—they were retrofitted for drone launches. The others were older, they looked intact. Still serving their original function, whatever that was.

Henderson spun the manual wheel in the center of a watertight door. It opened with a thermos-bottle thump and they ducked through. Into a coffinlike chamber plated with egg-carton antisound padding.

Laura felt the world tilt subtly beneath her feet. A river rush of ballast tanks and the distant whir of motors. The sub was diving. Then a startling junkyard chorus of pops, harsh creaks, glass-bottle clinking, as pressure began to bite into the hull.

Through the chamber into another room flooded with clean white light. Supersharp fluorescents overhead, that strange laserish light of three-peak spectrum radiance, casting everything into edgy superrealism. Some kind of control room, with a Christmas-tree profusion of machinery. Vast tilted consoles loomed, with banks of switches, flickering readouts, needle-twitching glassy dials. Sailors with short, neat haircuts sat before them in sumptuous padded swivel chairs.

The room was full of crewmen—she kept noticing more and more of them, their heads peeking out through dense clusters of piping and monitors. The room was jammed floor to ceiling with equipment and she couldn't find the walls. There were men in it elbow to elbow, crammed into arcane little ergonomic nooks. People sockets.

Acceleration hit them; Laura staggered a little. Somewhere, a faint high-pitched whine and a liquid trembling as the great steel mass picked up speed.

Just before her was a sunken area about the size of a bathtub. A man sat in it, wearing bulging padded headphones and clutching a knobbed steering wheel. He was like a child's doll surrounded by pricey stereo equipment. Just above his head was a gray gasketed lump with the stenciled legend
ANTI-COLLISION LIGHT
—
SWITCH TO FLASH
. He was staring fixedly at half a dozen round glass gauges.

This was the pilot, Laura thought. No way to look outside a submarine. Just dials.

Footsteps on a curved stairway at the back of the room—someone coming down from the upper deck. “Hesseltine?”

“Yo!” said Henderson cheerfully. He tugged Laura along by the wrist, and she slammed her elbow jarringly into a vertical column. “Come on,” he insisted, dragging her.

They threaded the maze, to meet their interrogator. The new man was portly, with black curled hair, pouting lips, his eyes heavy-lidded and solemn. He wore shoulder tabs, elaborate sleeve insignia, and a round black-brimmed sailor's cap with gold lettering.
REPUBLIQUE DE MALI
. He shook Henderson/Hesseltine's hand. Maddeningly, the two of them began speaking fluent French.

They climbed the spiral stairs, walked down a long dim stifling corridor. Hesseltine's shoes squelched loudly. They chattered in French, with enthusiasm.

The officer showed them into a set of narrow shower stalls. “Great,” said Hesseltine, stepping in and pulling Laura after him. For the first time, he let go of her wrist. “You up to taking your own shower, girl? Or do I have to help?”

Laura stared at him mutely.

“Relax,” Hesseltine said. He zipped out of his utility vest. “You're with the good guys now. They're gonna bring us something new to wear. Later we'll eat.” He smiled at her, saw it wasn't working, and glowered. “Look. What were you doing on that ship? You didn't turn data banker, did you? Some kind of double-agent scam?”

“No, of course not!”

“You got some special reason to regret those criminals?”

The moral vacuity in it stunned her. They were human beings. “No …” she blurted, almost involuntarily.

Hesseltine pulled off his shirt, revealing a narrow suntanned chest densely packed with muscle.

She stole a sidelong glance at his utility vest. She knew he had a gun in it somewhere.

He caught her looking and his face hardened. “Look. We'll make this simple. Get in the shower stall and don't come out till I say. Or else.”

She got into the shower and shut its door and turned it on. She stayed in it for ten minutes, while it squeezed out maybe a quart of buzzing ultrasonic mist. She rinsed salt from what was left of her clothes and ran some thin acrid soap through her hair.

“Okay,” Hesseltine shouted at her. She stepped out, wearing the raincoat again. Hesseltine was neatly groomed. He wore a midnight-blue naval uniform and was lacing his deck shoes. Someone had laid out a gray terry-cloth sweatsuit for her: drawstring pants, a hooded pullover.

She stepped into the pants, turned her back on him, threw off the raincoat, and tunneled quickly into the pullover. She turned back, saw that he had been watching her in the mirror. Not with lust or even appreciation—there was a chill, vacant look on his face, like an evil child methodically killing a bug.

As she turned back, the look vanished like a card trick.

He'd never sneaked a glimpse at all. Hesseltine was a gentleman. This was an embarrassing but necessary situation that the two of them were working through like adults. Somehow Hesseltine was managing to say all this to her, while bent over and tying his shoes. The lie was radiating out of him. Out of his pores, like sweat.

A sailor waited for them outside, a wiry little veteran with a gray mustache and faraway eyes. He led them aft to a tiny cabin, where the hull formed a rounded, sloping roof. The place was about the size of a garden tool shed. Four deathly pale sailors, with their sleeves rolled up and collars open, were sitting at a tiny cafe table, silently playing a checker game.

The French-speaking officer was there. “Sit down,” he said in English. Laura sat on a cramped wall bench, close enough to one of the four sailors that she smelled his floral deodorant.

Across the cabin, stuck to the curved ceiling, were idealized portrait posters of men in elaborate uniforms. She had a quick look at two of the names:
DE GAULLE, JARUZELSKI
. Meaningless.

“My name is Baptiste,” said the sailor. “Political Officer aboard this vessel. We are to have a discussion.” Pause, for two beats. “Would you like some tea?”

“Yes,” Laura said. The mist-shower hadn't offered enough for drinking. Her throat felt leathery with seawater and shock. She felt a sudden trembling shoot through her.

She didn't delude herself that this was a situation she could handle. She was in the hands of murderers. It surprised her that they would pretend to consult her about her own fate.

They must want something from her, though. Hesseltine's lean, weasely face had a look on it like something she would have scraped from a boot. She wondered how badly she wanted to live. What she was willing to do for it.

Hesseltine laughed at her. “Don't look that way, uh, Laura. Stop worrying. You're
safe
now.” Baptiste shot him a cynical look from beneath heavy eyelids. A sudden sharp cascade of metallic pressure pops rang from the wall. Laura started like an antelope. One of the four sailors nearby languidly moved a checker piece with one forefinger.

She stared at Hesseltine, then took a cup from Baptiste and drank. It was tepid and sweet. Were they poisoning her? It didn't matter. She could die at their whim.

“My name is Laura Day Webster,” she told them. “I'm an associate of Rizome Industries Group. I live in Galveston, Texas.” It all sounded so pathetically brittle and faraway.