Contraband Read online

  CONTRABAND

  George Foy

  © George Foy 1997

  George Foy has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1998 by Bantam Books.

  This edition published in 2019 by Endeavour Venture, an imprint of Endeavour Media Ltd.

  For Kitty Foy

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Dan Burke, Pete Sessa, Gin Ryan, Fred Barthet, Jean-Francis Perrot, the Writers’ Room, John Stearns, Jeff Kaufmann, and Tom Cook for their help on this book.

  Chapter One

  ‘A sort of lewd people called smuckellors, rarely heard of before these late disordered times, who make it their trade . . . to steal and defraud his Majesty of his Customs.’

  Royal proclamation, Westminster Palace

  9 August 1661

  The pilot had been on the run for almost twenty years before anyone realized, much less did anything about it.

  The first murmur of pursuit came faint and abstract as the sound of strangers whispering in a forgotten language in another room.

  It happened on an autumn Sunday in a village eighty-five miles up the Rio Chingado, in the corner of South America where Brazil, Colombia, and Peru are stitched together by rivers.

  The pilot was sitting, waiting for cargo, on the porch of a tin-roofed hut. The hut hung over the river on long thin stilts. It smelled of coffee and minerals and rot. The hut belonged to the Brazilian, who always sat in the corner behind the weighing table. If you came in without knowing he was there, you might not see the Brazilian, so still was he, so much a part of the jungle gloom inside this corrupted structure.

  A board of green wood linked the hut to the riverbank. The Cayman came down the plank like a ballet star, toeing delicately in soft gaucho boots. He peered behind the weighing table, noting the shine of metal and how it was reflected in the Brazilian’s eyes, apparently without reference to light.

  ‘T’ree tolas,’ he said. With one hand he lifted a cellophane bag against the window, against the canopy of fattened trees overhanging the river.

  The Cayman’s other hand gripped a two-foot-long glass jar. It was an old-fashioned specimen bottle with a bell-shaped end, of a type that might have been used one hundred years earlier for experiments concerning phrenology and the seat of intelligence. Behind a ceramic stopper, the glass was full of long and curled silver. Two copper wires twisted out of the ceramic. ‘No fuck conmigo, man,’ the Cayman went on, ‘dis t’ree at least.’

  The Cayman was fat and gray; fever had leached color from his skin the way rain leached the forest’s meager topsoil when the lumbermen had been and gone. His eyelids had folds so that when he blinked, three different cowls had to be moved in sequence to cover and uncover his pupils. A grimy mauve waistcoat failed to close over his large belly. Sweat dripped from his belly button, darkening his loose pants. It looked like he had pissed himself.

  The Brazilian was thin and taut as piano wire. He kept on spooning gold dust from a small gourd to an even smaller bronze scale. Kerosene lamps wrestled the jade gloom. The gold took this light, broke and yellowed it, played it against the brass weights.

  Smoke from the steam pumps of the emerald mines upstream formed parentheses around the hut. The tin roof cooled the air’s vapor, condensing it into water that dripped steadily on the floor.

  Clouds rubbed bruise marks into the jungle shade. A gunboat churned grayly upriver, radar turning in circular, arachnid alert.

  The Cayman spat into the river and picked his way over soft planks, through the riverside door, to the porch at the shack’s far end.

  The pilot did not look up. He stuck the second finger of his left hand in a mug of tinto. He squinted through black glasses toward his float-jet where it crouched warily among the tendrils of smoke and the coiled black muscles of the river, rocking slightly in the gunboat’s wake.

  The Cayman leaned forward, almost touching the pilot’s ear with his lips.

  ‘Bokon Taylay. He look for nosotros,’ the Cayman whispered.

  The pilot lifted his finger out of the coffee. The movement pulled sweat from every pore in his body. The boil in the pulp of his finger was plummy and taut. He stuck it in an adjoining cup of cachaca rum, and winced.

  ‘Go away, Fawcett,’ he muttered.

  Upriver on the same side, an ancient paddlewheeler lay half awash, braided to the bank with vines. Indios had slung hammocks from brass fittings in the saloon. Even from the hut you could hear their guitars rub, like rough tools scraping music from the substance of the jungle itself.

  In the trees overhead, bearded monkeys flung papaya rinds at each other. The trees’ roots were lean, and white from lack of sun. They touched the fallen rinds and closed on them, seeking food.

  ‘My last two cargoes, Bokon take.’

  ‘You’re breakin’ my heart.’

  ‘Bokon Taylay, he get everybody now. Tu sabes? He know de code. He know de dance.’

  ‘I told ya. No.’

  The Cayman smiled sadly. No man trades for love, he thought. It was as close to an article of faith as he possessed. He shifted the glass jar from left hand to right, and reversed the procedure for his bag of gold.

  ‘Fifteen tolas,’ he said. A tola was a wafer of gold, 3.75 troy ounces in weight. ‘Is K-Y, man. For dis you run only twelve bale of jisi. Next run, you bring Deutschmark. Or maybe you wan’ jive wi’ my pescado?’

  ‘Your fish don’t bother me.’

  ‘Escuchame.’ The Cayman leaned close. ‘Listen.’ The jungle had rotted his insides first and his breath smelled like mulch.

  ‘If you don’ help, my cargoes no run. If cargoes no run, my Indios no manjay.’

  ‘I got too much weight already.’ The pilot spoke too loud. He did not want to think about the Indians. ‘An’ I’m down with a tailo, for this run. So forget it.’

  A raindrop the size of a walnut cracked into the water. A gun coughed from the Brazilian side of the Chingado. A soldier came out of the frontier post and stared through night-vision goggles over the dark water. It was two in the afternoon.

  ‘Dey sell their M-2s. Can’t buy bullets. Already dey go back to blowpipes.’ The tone was full of hurt, but the Cayman’s face was rejigging itself in different directions – a curious sequence where the eyelids slid up, one after the other, and large cheek muscles hauled plates of fat out and up to reveal sharp teeth – a smile. His pupils narrowed. He jammed the bag of dust in a pocket of his waistcoat. The pilot dropped his right hand toward the switchblade in his boot, but the Cayman was quicke
r. He grabbed the glass jar with both hands and shook it very hard in front of the pilot’s face, the wires almost touching his nose.

  The jar exploded in a convulsion of finned and rounded silver, turning, twisting, folding. In the vortex of spasms you could catch a freeze-frame of Horror, its ratchet mouth and chainsaw teeth and psycho eyes.

  The pilot backed away from the electric eel and the sparking wires that conducted its fury. His chair tilted. The doubled pressure under the back legs finally tore the soggy fibers of the deck planks, and the legs broke through. The pilot toppled backward, without hope or possibility of saving himself; fingers spreading in a prayer for flight, he rolled straight over the edge of the deck, into the arterial river.

  The Chingado was hot as blood, thick as gruel, the color of double-strong espresso. As the water closed over his head and leaked through his lips the pilot thought he could taste the whole history of its run; the flatness of Cordillera snow, the grit of stolen soil. Lime of murdered Indians, of poisoned jaguars. In his mouth he knew the death of peasant squatters who wound up tied hand and foot in the Chingado’s middle stretch. He knew the quickness of alligators and blue piranhas and coral snakes, and the tiny silver fish that swim up your asshole and wedge themselves with hypo spines against the pink coruscations of your tripes.

  He shot out of the water faster than a panicked porpoise. At the top of his arc he wrapped both arms around one of the hut supports. With elbows and knees he tried shinnying up the pole toward the broken deck. Algae grew green, inch-thick on the support, and for every upward thrust the pilot lost almost as much ground as he’d gained, so that at the end of two minutes his ankles still hung in the umber water.

  The Cayman and the Brazilian stared over the edge of the deck, watching the pilot struggle among the fumes of mingled rivers. The Brazilian was laughing so hard he vibrated like an instrument and had to be held up by the fat man.

  The clouds released their water. The opposite bank disappeared behind metallic folds of rain.

  On the paddlewheeler, the guitars had stopped, or maybe it was just that the noise of rain overpowered their soft rhythms.

  In the forest behind the paddlewheeler an Indio wadded a dart, and lifted his blowpipe toward the invisible sun. The Indio belonged to a tribe that thought they were parrots. He wore yellow feathers around his neck to protect himself from humans.

  ‘I will radio to Chico Fong,’ the Cayman shouted. ‘He will make you take my jisi.’

  ‘Rot your balls,’ the pilot screamed. ‘You did this on purpose; you knew I hate getting my duds wet, ah you scum!’

  But the pilot’s anger was largely chemical and soon faded. When it was gone, he hung on to his pole, wondering when the two would get over their giggling long enough to throw him a rope. He wondered, also, how to prevent the Cayman from getting in touch with Chico.

  Wondered who in hell ‘Bokon Taylay’ was.

  It was his last trip to the Chingado, the pilot decided. He hated places with no horizon.

  The Indio’s dart found its mark.

  A baby monkey fell with no sound while its mother screamed from above.

  Chapter Two

  ‘The airplane is doubtless only a machine; but what a fine instrument for analysis!’

  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

  Terre des Hommes

  A chapter called ‘Sit On My Interface’ in the 14th edition of The Freetrader’s Almanac and Cookbook (Charras Press, Boulder, Colorado) – better known as the ‘Smuggler’s Bible’ – includes the following advice:

  The freetrader should always jive on the boundary layer between earth, air, water, and space. Interface like a beach, a storm front, a dewpoint; this is the space where different kinds of waves meet, flirt – and zoom-zoom into craziness, because it is the nature of a wave to believe it is unique. This is the space where matter splits from form, because the FORM of a wave is what holds it together. The weird trips of turbulence or surf offer the same opportunities for chaos and catastrophe as a human frontier. Chaos and catastrophe are the freetrader’s homeboys, because the instruments of the Man can ride only one wave of reality at a time . . .

  Practical applications of boundary-layer travel are numerous, especially if you want to evade visual and electronic surveillance in heavy crisis situations. They include dewpoint (fog), surf (small boat landings), saline layers and SOFAR (submarine operations), the Great Red Spot of Jupiter (radio transmissions), storm fronts (aviation, marine) . . .

  The pilot folded his hard-copy of the Smuggler’s Bible and stowed it in his chartcase with one hand while with the other he touched the control column, feeling the autopilot adjust as it kept his aircraft hurtling over the western Atlantic, dead in the lane where night and water stretched invisible fingers toward each other and danced briefly, like shy kids in white gloves, wherever wind rubbed, and fog precipitated, and waves built – never quite mingling.

  In the narrow windscreen, at forty-five feet of altitude and 320 knots of speed, the effect was hallucinating; worm after parallel, broken worm of white spume ripping out of the blue-black nothing of time unspent and distance-not-traveled, strobing almost quicker than the mind could grasp between dark sea and invisible night, to vanish one splinter of a second later under the nose-antenna of the jet.

  The deflectors barely managed to keep his windscreen clear of salt spray. The squirts of rain-repellent only smeared around salt left on the glass. That same spray must be soaking the turbine blades of his two Pratt and Whitneys. He would have to take the crate in for overhaul as soon as he got back to Newark.

  The pilot switched off the chartlight. The Smuggler’s Bible came in CD-ROM form but you could not fool around with LCDs and keyboard at this speed and altitude. Luckily Charras still printed hard-copy for Darkworld use – for places, in what was once called the ‘Third World,’ or the Third-World-like areas of richer countries, where freetraders tended to end up. He had taken a risk reading hard-copy at this altitude but the Smuggler’s Bible, if you ignored its weird pseudo-religious side, was full of vital info. It carried timetables for satellites, navigational listings from the Air Almanac, and microcharts of air routes with plastic magnifying pages attached. Also, the ‘Interface’ chapter ended with a list of the Bureau of Nationalizations’ Synthetic Aperture and phased-array radar frequencies. The Synthetic Aperture radar was mounted on modified AWACS that BON was flying on the Exuma-Brownsville axis. Phased-array was what the new high-endurance cutters were carrying. Therefore the risk was necessary.

  Only SA and phased-array radar stood a chance of touching a jet this low, and even that was a small threat.

  The real danger lay in this kind of flying; the dearth of altitude protecting him from normal radar left him no margin for error if something fucked up. And his reaction time was dragging.

  He’d been flying for thirteen hours, with one break to refuel at Duncan Town, in the Jumentos. It had not been much of a rest. He’d had to keep the engines whining while the plane floated at a broken dock; playing guard at the door while the Santa Martans and Guyanans aimed lusting eyes at his plane.

  They were dangerous, these Santa Martans and Guyanans of Duncan Town; men with razor smiles, falsely loose gaits, and eight generations’ worth of natural selection in the Caribbean piracy industry coursing through their veins. In cooperation with the Organizatsni they recently had taken over all the coke and smack traffic in the Northeast. They’d achieved this by blowing away their opponents, as well as their opponents’ families and third cousins and casual acquaintances and hairdressers, spreading carnage among the ports and airfields with Ingrams and M-16s and Roland anti-tank weapons. Thus the square-up smugglers – the ones who ran grass and gold and memory and stayed away from blow and Downtown – the square-ups kept a wary eye on them in case they got greedy for the rest. And so it was that the pilot had fought to stay alert for a total of an hour and twenty minutes while the dangerous men smoked spliffs around patched and leaky hoses full of warm Jet-A; while the moist
tradewind blew salt, crab skeletons, and bat guano into the delicate spinning whiskers of his turbines.

  The pilot’s eyes flicked automatically back and forth between the windscreen and his crucial sets of data; horizontal attitude indicator, gyro, vertical-velocity (windscreen); sat-nav, engine pressure ratio, first-stage compressor rpm (windscreen); fuel flow, air-speed, countermeasures readout – and back to the windscreen to resume the cycle.

  The pilot felt like the sheer torque of this work had altered him into a weird organism, half-blood, half-capacitor, specialized in the feedback between flight and darkness.

  The autopilot was coupled to a Sperry Terrain-Following-Radar, which was how it could handle the plane this low – but the TFR, liberated from a mothballed B-52, was old. Even with new TFR you were supposed to be right there, because if the unit malfunctioned, even briefly, you would have maybe half a second to correct the error before the waves smashed plane and pilot to a million separate pieces.

  Anyway he needed the discipline of sheepdogging the auto, to stay alert. The boil he’d got on the Rio Chingado had abscessed, he could feel his body temperature rising; and while his specialized hands and eyes could cope with reflexive supervision, the resulting fever made his mind wander.

  Sometimes he saw shapes rushing out of the night; snowy mountains, lace curtains, buildings of wedged glass that had no place in this part of the Atlantic. At other times the illusions were more disturbing, and the forms of extinct birds, striking fists, and choirs of blonde women clad only in turquoise ribbons, had he actually been flying, would have affected the soft touch of his hands, putting him perilously close to the snapping spume beneath him or the questing electronic waves above.

  The pilot, looking for solid images, checked his reflection in the side window. The features were strangely young; upturned nose, freckles; faraway and permanent grin crammed angular and Norman-Rockwell-ish into the leather World War I flying helmet that he’d modified to take audio from the countermeasures pak. It was the face of a slingshot sniper, an apple thief, someone who trafficked in firecrackers and baseball cards. A boy who stuck moths down girls’ blouses and filled his pockets with string or the dried skins of tree frogs. Even the glitter of headache, the blackened eye-sockets of fatigue could not put age on him.