Without warning

‘Radio’s fine…’ he started to say, then stopped. They’d been monitoring the airwaves for any US or Mexican government traffic, using the yacht’s high-gain antennae to eavesdrop on Coast Guard and Navy signals – a constant background chatter. It was only when Fifi pointed out the silence from the radio that he realised he’d heard nothing in over half an hour. Frowning at the bizarre weather up ahead, he hastened back below decks.

Mr Lee was flicking switches and twirling dials on the M802 marine radio. It was only then that they picked up the babble of some commercial station down in Acapulco, where a DJ was reading in heavily accented English a local police order imposing an immediate curfew that would remain in effect until contact with the central government was ‘re-established’.

‘Oh, bugger this…’ muttered Pete at the unpleasant feeling of dйjа vu. It transported him back to when he’d woken up late one morning, dockside in Santa Monica, after a hard night’s partying with his then relatively new crew-mates. He’d spent nearly the entire day mooching around, drinking Irish coffee and napping off his hangover. It was 11 September, 2001 and he’d missed almost all of the day that had changed the world. Only Lee’s return from the city in the afternoon had alerted him to the news from the East Coast. As he sat below decks now, sweat leaking out of his armpits and trickling down his sides, listening to an increasingly hysterical radio jock talking about ‘la catбstrofe’, and watching the strange, ghostly track of those five ships to the north, Pete Holder felt as though time had folded back in on itself.

‘I dunno what’s happened,’ he said, ‘but I’ve got a sick feeling about this. And about that weird fucking storm front. I’m gonna go with my gut. Mr Lee, let’s make ready for a fast run, sou’-sou’-west. Keep a watch on the Pong Su. If nothing changes, we’re gonna blow this off in fifteen minutes. I want to put some serious miles between us and… whatever.’

* * * *

The Diamantina slipped through a light swell, pushed south-southwest by a freshening breeze. Mr Lee had the wheel, as phlegmatic in the face of world’s end as he had been staring down the barrel of an M16 in Bali. Pete wondered what, if anything, would upset him. Not that it mattered, because between himself and the Twins there was plenty of freaking out to go around.

‘Zombie Jew on a fucking Zimmer frame,’ cursed Fifi.

‘What?’

‘It’s redneck for “Christ on a crutch”, Pete. Let’s stay on the ball, shall we?’ said Jules.

The three smugglers were crouched in front of the Samsung monitor, a brand new 23-inch flat screen Pete had picked up back in La Paz during a night of tequila shots and hard bartering with an Italian yachtsman of long acquaintance. CNN’s Asian bureau, reporting out of the network’s regional HQ in Hong Kong, was running in a small window that took up about a quarter of the screen. Jules had plugged into the live web feed via an iridium phone, and if they watched it much longer they’d need all the counterfeit money in the hold to pay this month’s bill. If it ever arrived.

Pete’s eyes flicked over to the GPS window, which showed them retreating from the abandoned rendezvous with the Pong Su at eleven knots. The North Korean ship was still describing a long, lazy arc that would eventually see it run aground somewhere near Mazatlan, in the next day or so. Pete, the only one of them to have a seat in front of the display, had to rub his eyes. Like an addicted gamer, he’d been staring so hard at the screen he hadn’t blinked in a long while. He shook his head as he rubbed the irritation away, his vision blurring slightly when he refocused on the window in which footage of a major highway crash was now being shown.

He couldn’t get his head around these pictures, which had come in from a small Canadian news team – some guys out of Quebec, according to the dateline. The image seemed to be out of focus or something. He could tell they were looking at a big pile-up on a six-lane highway, but everything was indistinct, as though viewed through poorly blown glass.

‘The effect is stationary,’ the heavily accented Quebecois voice-over assured everyone. ‘Mounted Police at the scene are not allowing anyone to approach the phenomenon after the loss of the two fire engines.’

Blurred, wavering vision of two fire tenders came up, both of them overturned in a deep ditch by the side of the road. A few hundred metres beyond them, a large pile-up of vehicles burned freely.

‘Oh man, this is really putting the zap on my head,’ Fifi muttered.

‘We need to think this through,’ said Jules, in her oddly cool, high-tone manner. ‘This could be quite awful.’