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  The pilot winced. He did not care to look fifteen. It made clients think maybe they could get away with things.

  (Like Poop-face Provenzano had gotten away with things.)

  The pilot checked the plane’s trim, reflexively, while the memory jimmied its way into the front of his brain.

  The thing with Poop-face happened in the days before the pilot learned to fly, when he had quit Trout River Voke because he was so goddam sick of being young, and in school, and in upstate New York. All he’d wanted to do in those days was go fast. The destination didn’t matter, it was speed alone that counted.

  *

  He’d spent days following the downhill speed-skiing circuit, training to be one of those human bullets in stretch kevlar suits locked onto ten-foot boards.

  He’d watched hours of Sunday television to catch the scant coverage of luge, or motorcycle rallies, or Open Offshore Superboat racing in the deceptively smooth swells off Florida.

  Superboats, the young pilot had decided, were the best. The V-hulls were huge, sharp, dangerous as the water they moved upon. They mounted two, three, sometimes four turbocharged engines of up to eighteen hundred horsepower apiece. They thundered over the ocean at speeds close to 150 m.p.h. and spent as much time in the air between waves as on the water. Their drivers wore oxygen equipment to filter out the engine gases, and water-cooled suits; they sat in airtight one-piece titanium ejection pods built for fighters. The pods were supposed to protect them in case the boat flipped, or burned, or sank. In practice, the pods just broke up, melted, or went to the bottom with the rest of the boat.

  One day the pilot told his parents he was going to South Florida to work on the superboat circuit and become, eventually, a racer.

  ‘What part of Florida?’ his father asked.

  ‘It’s a circuit, Papi,’ the young pilot answered. ‘Lauderdale, Miami, the Everglades. Key West.’

  His father reflected a moment.

  ‘You got the Apalachicola Northern Railroad, the Seaboard Coast, the Florida East Coast,’ said Roman Marak. Roman had worked on railroads all his life, and tended to define issues by what trains ran, or had run, in the area. ‘Also, you will be near Cuba, the Bahamas, Jamaica, if you get into trouble.’

  Even at that time Roman Marak was fairly certain his son would wind up with uniformed men at his heels.

  ‘I’ll pack your swimsuit,’ his mother said.

  So young Josef Marak – he was seventeen then – collected his savings from the Oneida County Savings Bank, and an Amtrak ticket from his father, and boarded a train going south.

  He showed up in Everglades City eight days before the Everglades International Open Ocean Superboat Challenge Cup. For five days he was abused, laughed at, and sometimes propositioned by overweight, loud, foul-talking men in greasy overalls. For five nights he slept under a tarp in a mechanic’s pit that smelled of oil, whiskey and semen, in that order. On the sixth day Cal Bigbee – the biggest, loudest, foulest-talking man of them all – took pity on the Yankee kid with the funny accent and hired him on a temporary basis as coffeeboy and grease-monkey for the Miss Slew/Rebel Beer hydroplane racing team.

  The pilot was good with his hands. More importantly, he loved machinery; loved the way it rumbled, interlocked, even ‘thought’ in that honest, gleaming, step-by-step way machines had. The tight tolerances of superblower flanges rang like crystal in his brain. He adjusted them carefully, sensually, by feel, like playing an instrument. The clean balance of nitrated clutches, the smooth conjunctions of lubricant seemed to him the poetry of matter itself, the push-and-pull of atoms translated to heat and steel specifically for the religious devotions of man. After nine months on the circuit he could fine-tune the fuel injection on a fourteen-hundred-horsepower Statkus-Chevy as well as Cal Bigbee. After fourteen months Cal let him ride as driver, then throttleman on the Miss Slew.

  ‘V-hull racing,’ Cal used to tell him reassuringly, ‘it’s just like handlin’ a woman. Y’all got to go so fast you’re ready to explode with every cross-wave. But at the same time y’all got to go just slow enough that she don’t blow up on you – keep her turbo and water temp and oil pressure just south of red-line the whole way.’

  On his third race the pilot pushed Miss Slew at an average speed of 139.74 m.p.h. over a 115-mile course. He won the heat on a red-hot bearing that burned the boat to the waterline ten minutes after he crossed the finish line.

  Cal Bigbee knocked him off the dock by way of firing him. Poop-face Provenzano found him sitting on the dock that same night, drinking Rebel beer, nursing his bruises. Listening to the pelicans splash and croak.

  Poop-face had no nose to speak of. He was weedy and dressed in Kmart ‘Windjammer’ shorts and a safari jacket he thought made him look like Gregory Peck but in fact made him look like what he was, which was a geek.

  ‘You wanna drive superboats?’ Poop-face asked him.

  ‘Who’s gonna hire me?’ the pilot asked sadly. Rebel beer was making him morose. ‘After I burned Cal’s boat.’

  ‘Might know some people,’ Poop-face offered.

  ‘Nah,’ the pilot answered. ‘I’m thinking of learnin’ to fly. I’m sick of fuckin’ with machines only spend half their time in the air.’

  ‘Fifteen thousand dollars a run,’ Poop-face said softly.

  ‘Sens’?’ The pilot had been around South Florida long enough to know what was going on.

  ‘Hunnert bales of Guajira.’

  Fifteen thousand bucks would pay for flying school, qualify him on small jets, maybe leave a little left over, the pilot thought.

  ‘For fifteen grand, maybe I could fuck around a little while longer,’ he told Poop-face.

  Poop-face showed him the craft. It was a former circuit tunnel-boat, a catamaran-planer with twin turbocharged Lycomings, rigged for single-handling. The pilot found out later what everyone on the waterfront knew all along, namely that the boat was so old it had two chances in five of surviving the 320-mile round trip to Mangrove Cay. Also the going rate was $25,000 for a hundred-bale run where the cargo would bring in close to a million dollars on the street. However in the beginning the pilot did not know any better and in due course he drove the boat carefully through the loud warm waters to Andros, and then back in a screaming, spine-telescoping rocket-ride over the odd-shaped swells and the startled dolphins, trying to keep the craft somewhere near stable at 95 m.p.h., skimming her like a fiberglass frisbee from the cracking slope of one wave to the ragged crest of the next; betting on luck and reflexes and good night-vision, waiting for the engines to rip out of their cracked supports or crush the craft like a Christmas ornament against the cement sea; looking for cutters and the slow boats of Customs under the great devil’s temple of the tropical night—

  *

  A hint of green and white in the corner of one eye and the pilot stabs down with his right foot, yanks the control column back and right with the left hand while his right mashes the thrust levers forward for maximum power, the ancient Citation-C slewing to the right in a 375-knot banking climb that brings it over the deck of a light Panamanian crude carrier with a good twelve feet to spare.

  The tanker was gone – smeared yellow decklights, bow wave, rusting pump system lost under the plane’s right wing.

  The pilot’s fingers trembled as he adjusted the ECM-pak to include marine frequencies. The ECM-pak was an oversized laptop that plugged into the electrics of whatever mode of transport you were riding in. It included a jammer, a communications scrambler, wide-spectrum scanners, a satellite navigation system, a single-sideband transceiver, along with software that tracked radar and other electronic traffic in relation to your own position.

  He brought the plane steady at forty-five feet and checked the sat-nav readings, and the chart. He should have remembered the Ambrose shipping lanes. If you flew at sea level, it followed that ships were going to pose a collision hazard.

  Squawks, yammers, and curses in Portuguese and Spanish perkled from the back of the plane as
part of the cargo woke up.

  The pilot carefully adjusted the trim, seeking a hint of nose-heaviness. He checked the ECM screen, but no radio input was visible in the short-range; the tanker had been asleep, or indifferent. More likely, he was washing his tanks into the cleanish brine and did not want to disturb the authorities at this point.

  The pilot blipped on the weather radar to check he was still shadowing the north-south axis of a frontal system that would track him nice and discreet over the coast at Deer Isle, Maine, in 50.6 minutes. He recalibrated the TFR against the radio-altimeter and the horizontal indicator, and brought the jet up to sixty feet. This altitude would increase the danger of being spotted but it was an acceptable risk. The Smuggler’s Bible said all AWACS were down for another thirty-two minutes in this sector. He allowed himself one final glimpse at the invisible horizon. Then he went aft.

  The most important cargo needed little space and no maintenance. It consisted of three fiberglass suit-cases crammed with rough Sierra Parima emeralds, strapped into the last remaining seat of what had once been the passenger section; also, one medium-sized, Tienshan-built refrigerator, bolted to aluminium rails on the deck and hooked up to a bank of truck batteries behind.

  The emeralds were valuable enough, but the refrigerator was beyond price, for it contained 4,082 cultures of pirated Korean aminochips. This was enough to start your own live-semiconductor factory. Theoretically, with your own factory, you could bust wide open TransCom’s monopoly in the field of organic microchips. It was a modern version of printing your own money, the pilot thought.

  The less valuable part of the cargo filled four-fifths of the cabin space with flapping, stale smells, and blinking brass-colored irises. When he switched on the emergency lighting it once more took up the chorus of shrieks and catcalls with which it had greeted his jump over the Panamanian tanker:

  ‘Ay! Ay! Ay mi vida!’

  ‘Vaya al infierno maricon!’

  ‘Hegel, apostata!’

  Twenty-five Spix’s macaws gawked, perched on one leg, cocked heads, shat, fluttered, bitched, and rubbed their bills against the cage bars; twenty-five living tapestries of feather and bad temper, three feet long from beak to tail, held together by the rules of flight and the harmonics of color; dark indigos, dove-grays, a play of olive and aqua under the dim cabin lights; twenty-five pampered and restricted fowl with a black-market value of seventy thousand dollars apiece in New York, and twice that in Frankfurt.

  The pilot smiled. He thought the birds were the most beautiful things he had ever seen. It made him feel good to run this kind of cargo. For the sixth time since he’d left the Rio Chingado he checked their food. He refilled their water, adding a few drops of vodka from a flask in his flying jacket to put them back to sleep. Working fast, he uncoiled a hose, went back to the cockpit, cracked the copilot’s window, fed three feet of hose into the jet’s slip-stream and, using the tube’s other end like a hoover, vacuumed the worst of the shit from the parrots’ pens. Talking to them in adult tones.

  As he worked he pulled out a half-gourd of coca leaves he had bought from the Cayman. He stuck three fingers-worth in his mouth, with a dusting of lime powder. Chewing the mixture would keep him awake, gently buzzed, without the ragged edge of straight perica.

  The ECM alarm beeped in his headset.

  Dropping the hose, the pilot ran back to his cockpit.

  Two minutes before the ECM display had been quiet; he had seen eighteen narrow yellow lines only, indicating the tanker’s short-range radar, fourteen commercial flights, and the faint touch of air traffic radar from FAA’s Westbury Tracom Center as well as JFK and Tweed-New Haven.

  Now, all of a sudden, thick tracks of cobalt dominated half the screen; three different vectors denoting strong radar, behind, above, to the right.

  Adrenaline ran over fever, headache, fatigue. The pilot switched off the autopilot and slotted straight into reflex.

  Chapter Three

  ‘The Manila revolt gave BON bureaucrats the chance they’d been looking for. Though the node-rebels didn’t nationalize shit, they did back up the takeover of Chevron and Weyerhauser orgs by local employees, at a price the oil and lumber honchos did NOT dig. This was termed nationalization, back in Washington, and it made the Bureau of Nationalizations the point organization to zap these node upstarts in the balls. The enabling regs, it turned out, put nationalization and smuggling in the same legal dope-bale. Evidence suggests the hungry lawyers of BON may have brewed this power-play for some time . . . In any event, when the Manila intervention went off cool – thanks to the far-out intelligence at BON’s disposal – BON was in a position to corner the market in all extra-national law enforcement.’

  Hawkley

  The Freetrader’s Almanac and Cookbook

  (Appendix ‘F’)

  The pilot gooses the ECM-pak’s audio, jams the thrust-levers to ninety percent.

  He pushes the controls forward to bring the Citation back down to forty-five feet – the waves reaching for him once more, lethal, loving.

  ‘— late, asshole.’ The programmer of the ECM-pak is a friend, but the recorded profanity sits ill with the situation. ‘Attack radar, look-down shoot-down, three contacts, 193 degrees, 301 degrees.’ There are two more sets of readings, two numbers each. The second number is a vertical bearing.

  The pilot pulls in the vacuum-hose, closes the copilot’s window. The cockpit noise dims to a rushing hum. To the west, the front’s cumulus clouds rise like great circular castles into the purple night. Their insides glow with lightning.

  He jinks left, pulling up a hair. The readout shows the targets shift with him.

  ‘A-6 Vikings. Two contacts. Mark-Seven Predator, one contact.’ The Predator is a UAV, an unmanned observation aircraft piloted from a VR terminal on the ground up to three hundred miles away.

  ‘Predator switching to pulse. Evasive action, evasive. Move it, motherfucker.’

  Vikings. The pilot winces a bit, though the shadow associated with these planes has hung over his mind since Rio Chingado.

  Vikings means BON, for only BON flies these all-weather surveillance interceptors.

  BON means the Bureau of Nationalizations of the Joint Committee on Intelligence.

  It has only been sixteen months since BON was put in charge of specific activities of the NSA, DEA, Coast Guard, Air Force, and CIA aimed at elimination of, not only smuggling, but any offshore action that subverts the US-EC share of Darkworld trade. However BON’s bureaucrats have been so thorough in their takeover that their acronym is now used officially on patrol and interception craft.

  They have done their job so ruthlessly that the jets, high-endurance cutters, and internment camps of BON have come to equate with disappearance in the minds of those who try to subvert its shadowed force.

  The pilot tunes the ECM’s radio scan back to aviation.

  ‘—IFF,’ the voices are calling. The voices are evil by default, there is no feeling in them, one way or the other. Automatic-cool. ‘Unidentified aircraft, Montauk sector, United States BON patrol, identify-friend-or-foe.’

  No time for useless questions, like how in hell did they find him so quickly when he was only sixty feet from the waves for maybe a minute and a half and there are no theater-control aircraft over this sector for another twenty-six minutes?

  The pilot hits his own pulse radar. It shows the BON jets at 8,200 feet and closing. The thick cobalt lines converge on a green dot marking the Citation. The cobalt shimmers, turns briefly pink, goes back to cobalt.

  When the line turns solid red it will mean the Vikings have locked on their target.

  He asks the ECM to jam the Vikings’ attack wavelengths. The Vikings counter immediately by using jump frequencies. Then they jam his own radar. These boys are good.

  He bounces the throttles against their stops but the Vikings are new and his Cessna is old and weighed down with her Dornier-Akai floatgear.

  ‘—required to consider this aircraft hostile.’<
br />
  The pilot flicks on the ECM’s chart display. The satnav puts him thirty-seven miles from the Connecticut coast, twenty-eight miles from Montauk. So little cover here. He can dogleg back to JFK, and its rat’s nest of air-traffic patterns. Or he can aim for the storm front, three miles to his left, in the hope that lightning and sheet rain will confuse the Vikings’ radar, giving him a chance to lose himself higher up the dense commercial traffic of the Northeast corridor.

  ‘The freetrader should always jive on . . . the boundary layer.’ The words of the Smuggler’s Bible come back to him like a curse. The Bible is OK but at times like this its hipster groove, its use of Lingua, make him feel lonely – as if danger immediately puts him out of the reach of the conceits and theories of normal men.

  He pulls the plane up and left, climbing toward the storm, and catches a glimpse of one of the Vikings’ navigation lights blinking tiny against vague stars, out the side window. Still much higher. The second Viking transmits from behind: ‘Be advised I am authorized to interdict. Repeat, I will interdict if you do not respond or change course away from US airspace.’

  One of the cobalt lines turns red, and pulses.

  ‘Lock-on,’ the ECM informs him. ‘AMRAAM, infrared targeting, fifteen seconds. Good luck, buttbrain.’

  The first lumps of turbulence hit. Rain makes a million silent cracks on the windscreen. The Citation will never reach the clouds on time. Impulsively the pilot flips a red cover and hits the button underneath. A series of explosive bolts on the plane’s belly blasts off welds on the huge aluminium sled and the smaller wingtip floats that allow this jet to land on water. The Cessna bucks violently, rears forty degrees, aims at the stars, wings left toward the black waves. The pilot fights hand-to-hand for control. Wrestling rudder, elevators, trim tabs, he evens out the plane’s flight. Airspeed climbs ninety knots and he veers the jet suddenly to the right, into the path of a small outrider of cloud. Vapor streams, the Citation breaks free; then plunges without fuss into the main storm front.