Contraband Read online

  On the ECM display, the second cobalt line goes the color of well-oxygenated blood.

  ‘Circus Two,’ one of the BON pilots says, ‘commencing attack pattern.’

  The pilot jams the levers to full thrust. He pulls the plane into a steep climb, aiming for the deep blue phantoms of electricity inside one of the storm cells.

  ‘Pendejo!’ One of the macaws is so loud you can hear him even over the turbines. ‘Pendejooo!’

  ‘AMRAAM, fuckface!’ the ECM snaps. ‘Drop flares. Drop flares!’ Burning flares would confuse the Vikings’ heatseeker missiles. But the Citation has no flares.

  The oil temperature on the port engine shudders into the red zone. The Citation was not designed to run at full speed when it was new. It is now sixteen years and eighteen thousand hours of engine time older, and anyway the pilot has unhooked the governor so he can run the engines twenty or thirty percent over TSO.

  ‘Missile closing; evade, evade!’

  Air buckles and breaks around the plane. The pilot is throwing it from side to side but the storm is gaining control and throwing the jet around far more radically than he can. Lightning spiderwebs the dark. A splayed brush of flame tears past the cockpit. The missile disappears in the cloud, searching for the greater heat, leaving everything yellow in its wake.

  The pilot’s guts heave. He pulls back on the thrust levers. Eleven thousand feet, and lightning has killed the gyro, but the display still shows cobalt, and close radar activity.

  The Smuggler’s Bible update on CD-ROM includes software based on nonlinear equations – period-doubling, fractal-progressing. Supposedly, that software can be hooked to your autopilot to blend you like a major chord straight into the harmonics of a storm-cell such as this. However, the update had not arrived by the time the pilot left for Rio Chingado and for now the pilot is lost.

  Twelve thousand three hundred feet. Electricity cracks the clouds again, lifts them like a can opener. The lightning spreads, claws closer, it is all around, it holds the plane in crooked blue fingers. A weird green haze grows from the wings. ‘Fuck!’ shrieks the ECM-pak as its circuits cook. The circuit breakers flip, the display goes blank.

  Abruptly the plane drops like someone yanked the sky from under it. Lacking bite, the wings tremble and pull to the left in the opening steps of a stall.

  The pilot pins the control column forward and left, and knocks the thrust levers wide open again.

  Now vacuum is king. The Citation is dropping belly-first into a pit of flashing violet nothing, lined with the striations of clouds. The striations resemble geological deposits. With every bolt of lightning the bands light up like neon signs, glaring every shade of pink and blue known to the universe.

  ‘Hegel nao vede,’ yells a macaw who was once owned by a Jesuit in Belem.

  ‘I shoulda given ’em more vodka,’ the pilot thinks, irrelevantly.

  Seven thousand eight hundred feet.

  Turbines screaming, the plane accelerates through a movie of rose, sapphire, turquoise, lavender, carmine, midnight blue. The noise is terrifying; scream of engines, bang of windshear, the maddened baying of airfoils. The pilot keeps the control column down and left, bouncing against the straps of his seat belt, sweat shaking off in every direction, but the plane is only half responding, the nose is still cocked up, it’s falling more like a rock than a flying thing. If he ever comes out of this stall he will never, ever again take the governor off a Pratt and Whitney 545. Never chew coca, never run parrots.

  Six thousand feet.

  The weird light has grown. It has become a uniform green-silver haze. The haze seems to take root in everything it touches, silver-green tendrils reaching into the core of matter, into the aircraft’s wings, into the walls of this canyon in the sky, where it pulsates like some radiation of evil.

  The buffeting gets worse. The wings will fall off, the whole fabric of the Citation will give if this goes on any longer. A bell rings; the left engine’s oil pressure is down. The pilot starts to laugh. Everything is so absurdly out of control, it seems the only rational reaction.

  But, at last, the plane is starting to respond. The nose drops, the control surfaces bite. The Citation twists viciously, into a dive. The pilot pulls back, seeking horizon. The nose comes up twenty degrees from the vertical. Strands of black cloud reach for the plane to grab it back into the heart of the weather.

  Four thousand five hundred feet.

  There is a christly almighty bang. It feels as if the plane has hit a wall of very thick rubber. The macaws are shaken so hard they shut up—

  Then he is through. The wings are lifting again. The silver-green haze is gone. He pulls the plane back into level flight; it responds mushily, as if cotton filled the spaces in the hydraulic pistons, and between the miniature jewels of microcircuits. He throttles back to cruising power. The fire alarm trumpets doom in the left turbofan. The pilot shuts it all the way down. He lets loose the left extinguishers, and cuts the alarm.

  The ECM-pak repeats, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,’ monotonously in his headset. He shuts that down too. He is blind and deaf to radar now, but there is peace in this fact. If the AMRAAM comes he will not know it, except for the briefest awareness of flame, and pressure.

  Lightning winks and pulses in the contusion of sky, but its flash is suddenly thin.

  The front is behind them.

  *

  Four thousand feet below and three miles ahead, gold streetlights mapped out the herd instincts of humans against the more complex parameters of the coast.

  A plane appeared from a rainsquall a mile away, a little lower, to the south. The pilot jerked, then relaxed; it was a commercial airliner, a turboprop, Dash-7 by the high wings, losing altitude for an approach to— He had no idea where.

  The pilot flicked on the chartlight and picked up the Smuggler’s Bible, opening it to the Newark-Logan chart. The sat-nav, the gyro unit were both locked into the dead ECM. It would take too long to switch the pak’s circuit breakers back to ‘on,’ and then reboot the system.

  He looked at his watch.

  He estimated nine minutes flight through the storm, at an average 225 to 275 knots. It felt more like two hours. He must have been heading dead north, when he was heading anywhere, to hit the coast this soon. Montauk was too small for Dash-7s. New London, or more likely Providence.

  He looked at the chart again. He thought there was no way he could have covered the fifty miles to the coast in that time, even at maximum speed.

  But the yellow tracery was below him now, and this was not Suffolk County.

  The Smuggler’s Bible says;

  There are two goals the freetrader seeks in the interface. Uno is evasion, because the boundary layers royally shine on the forces of the Man. Dos is even more cool. Because the craziness of this space puts in doubt our oh-so-touching belief in the togetherness of matter and wave, and in this Nirvana of cosmic potential, the freetrader may be able to focus the power of his imagination – the part of the brain that makes the leap between wave and matter possible in the first place – with mind-fucking results in camouflage, evasion, and speed.

  ‘Bullshit,’ the pilot grumbled to himself, as the oil pressure alarm for the right turbine started to shrill—

  *

  Time, which was just getting its breath back, stretches like a Slinky once more. Options fade. With the jettisoning of the float-tank, the Cessna has become a land bird. The pilot drops the nose, speeds up a hair. He cranks in thirty percent flaps and slots himself fifty yards behind and a little above the Dash-7’s broad tail, well outside the scan of collision-avoidance radar. He throttles back and follows.

  He used to run a ‘dummy’ a few years ago when he flew into South Florida. He hired another pilot to fly out of Lauderdale, legally, and circle an Aerocommander ten miles offshore at seven thousand feet. At an appointed time the pilot, flying below radar from the south with his plane’s transponder shut off, would climb fast to seven thousand and slip right behind the Aerocommand
er. To any radar – even AWACS – the two planes were now one and, since the Aerocommander was tagged and identified, they could fly back into Florida unchallenged.

  With any luck, the same thing will happen here. Air traffic control at TF Green Airport will read the two planes as a single Dash-7, and dismiss any earlier readings as ghosts.

  Watching the right turbine oil pressure drop. Crabbing the Citation on one engine over the De Havilland’s propwash.

  *

  Narragansett Bay snakes and narrows to the right. Lights thicken around its course. The Dash-7 curves northeast to approach Green from that direction, into the prevailing southwest wind. The strange skyline of Providence brightens and dims, abnormal EKG of city streets through the smog. A sign blinks green; even at that altitude the words are legible. ‘ZERO COLA,’ it says, ‘NOTHING but GREAT TASTE!’ The pilot examines the chart again, looking for a secondary airport where he will stand a better chance of avoiding questions from men in suits. The abandoned Navy yard at Quonset Point has an airfield. ‘Emergencies only,’ the notation on the chart says. They are six miles from Green.

  Now the right oil temperature sweeps into the red zone so fast he can see the needle move. The fire alarm for the right engine glares at him.

  The pilot throttles back to minimum speed. He can no longer keep up with the turboprop. With one finger he wipes sweat from his forehead between helmet and eyebrows. Then he peels off left, away from the massed glows of Providence and Cranston and their connective tissue of road.

  The plane loses altitude. The bay shows up again to his left; flat gleam of reflected light cluttered with black gridwork of old pumping stations, railroad workings, oil tanks, a hurricane barrier. To his right now, headlights crawl like bugs along a beam. A six-lane rises on ornate supports, arching one hundred feet into the smog as if repulsed by what lies below. The pilot gets a sudden flash of Carmelita, with her mouth slightly open and surprise in her eyes, the way she looks when she is just on the point of coming; as if everything is about to fall apart, and gravity no longer works. He might never make love with her again. This does not seem to matter as much as it should.

  The Citation drops faster. He will never make the disused airfield. Bluish security lights define broken-down hangars and gantries and, in their midst, flat tracts of gray. Marshland, between slime and the river. If he can land on one of those tracts, the pilot thinks, he might just get away with it. More soft gray appears, dividing a line of jetties, the four giant concrete vents of a former ammo dump. Far ahead, the long slow arc of the New Davisville Bridge lifts a string of orange lights to the sky, like a woman offering an amber necklace to her lover.

  He shuts down the right turbine and hits the extinguisher. Adding an extra forty percent flaps, he aims for the gray. He is losing altitude fast. Radio towers loom from nowhere, on the right. They miss his right wing by a bad joke. He can see the dark channels in the marsh now; can pick out clumps of reeds, pilings, abandoned barges; scattered among them, the ragged scarlet orange of marshfire. The sweat soaks his armpits, drips off his nose. There is too much relief here. He should go for a straight water landing but he has no altitude. The stall alarm buzzes. Options gone, he pushes the nose down a little, ekes left, and lets her settle quickly toward what looks like a long bank of cattails with only a couple of black bits of solid piling or other junk to rip into her tender belly . . .

  The old Citation hits the marsh perfectly. It’s as if she knows it’s her last landing. The cattails sit on a bed of saltwater and mud as well as avgas, dumped hydrochlorines, and old rocket fuel from a long-abandoned BOMARC missile site. Inky liquid smashes over the windscreen. The pilot is jammed forward against the instruments. It feels like a six-hundred-pound weightlifter is ramming him in the small of the back. A couple of bangs, insanely loud, against the fuselage; a howl of friction and tearing molecules. For what seems like minutes, every bump and crevice of the dead marsh adds its instrument to the continuous symphony of destruction playing on the plane’s aluminium skin.

  The aircraft leans right. The right wing trips in the sludge. The Citation slews in that direction, stemming up a tall roostertail of water, shit, and debris, and skids to a soft halt about four hundred yards from where she first hit the marsh.

  ‘Coño.’ One of the macaws speaks in wonder.

  There is so little sound now. Only the hiss of water where it touches hot turbine, and the gurgling of mud, and a trickle of Duncan Town jet fuel.

  *

  The marsh feels the intrusion.

  The marsh is still alive – almost, barely, all the close words.

  Once it was quick and vigorous. It was part of a single organism made of thousands of such marshes from Canada to Florida. It formed part of an unbelievably complex and rich stew of nutrients and heat and fast reactions, brimming with sex, sex and more sex; sex of algae and noctiluca and fiddler crab; sex electric and blue, or sex small and armored, or sex tiny and jelly-like, or tall and gawky and top-of-the-food-chain – a whole universe whose fuel was sunshine and whose product was change. A powerful, subtle, benign monster that created, maintained, and protected a gene pool for half the living creatures of the Atlantic.

  But that was long ago. Now the marsh has changed. Twisted by the abuse of men, it has turned evil. Like a spider. The foul water is its poison; the web is its grasses; the mud is its cocoon. It palps its latest prey with liquid fingers. Long, cool, heavy – smooth. Already the mud settles below, the reeds drift in from the side. In a few weeks the Citation will be part of the bay’s mutated agony. By the time spring comes, it will be gone . . .

  Chapter Four

  ‘It is interesting also to note that stories about smuggling flourish in proportion to the intensity with which the attendant laws are enforced and the severity of the penalties attached to them.’

  Horace Beck

  Folklore and the Sea

  The main door was jammed and it took the pilot fifteen minutes to pop the emergency exit. It was a rough fifteen minutes because he kept expecting the Jet-A to ignite and roast him like a Thanksgiving turkey; but the extinguishers had done their job and nothing happened.

  When he finally got his head outside, the sky to the east was free-basing blue.

  Smoke from marshfire drifted through the reeds. There was a smell of ash, and things dying. The bridge approach highway exhaled endlessly, above and to the west. Trucks shoved headlights into the sky.

  The pilot stilled the tremble in his fingers.

  Inside the cabin, the emergency lighting cheaply rationed out its pink glow. The refrigerator had sheared right off its rails on impact and burst open like a rotten mango. Little cone-shaped glass vials full of cryoliquid lay all over the cabin floor. A number of the vials had broken, exposing the tiny spinach-green root network of their individual plants. The plants contained forty-two million potential analog switches per ounce, which was not far from the density of the human brain. Each looked like a dot of green lichen and smelled like old broccoli.

  The pilot broke the seal on one of the fiberglass suitcases. Here was green of a different order. The emeralds were raw, uncut, lined up in foam and odd sizes, but even in the battery light they smoldered with a sallow flame that promised the blooming of a thousand more greens once the random insults of geological time had been burred and polished away on 47th Street.

  The aminochips were a loss, the pilot decided. With luck he could save the emeralds. There was only one thing he had ever really wanted to do with the birds.

  He went back to the cockpit, unplugged the ECM-pak from its jacks, and folded it shut. Locked and slung by its leather strap over one shoulder it looked like a plain aluminium suitcase, much dented by travel, colorfully spotted by stickers from hotels, and Darkworld airlines. He slung the chartcase, containing the plane’s false papers and the Smuggler’s Bible, on his other shoulder. In the cargo bay he unbuckled the straps securing the macaws’ cages against the bulkheads. Broken vials crunched beneath his workboots. The smell
of broccoli grew downright offensive. One by one he dragged the coops to the door and out onto the slippery wing.

  The birds smelled the cold air, the sick grasses, the dead water.

  ‘Cabron,’ one of them muttered.

  ‘Hegel, Diablo,’ the Jesuit bird answered sadly.

  ‘Evade, missile closing,’ commented a third.

  ‘I’m sorry ’bout this,’ the pilot told them. ‘I don’t like Davisville, either, but it’s the best I could do.’ He opened the cage doors wide.

  The Jesuit bird was the first to move. It shuffled sideways through the canted flood of birdshit, organochips, sawdust, puked sunflower seeds. Swayed on the cage’s sill. Still woozy from vodka, it hopped out on the wing, and fell flat on its beak.

  Another macaw followed its lead, then another. Finally they were lined up like the Supreme Court; hung over, shortsighted, still pompous in their gaudy robes.

  The pilot was never sure which went first. All he knew was that one of the Spix’s macaws suddenly spread its wings and even in the half light between neon and dawn it looked as if all the complex forces of spring shone from its feathers. It took off, without hesitation, straight up, and disappeared over the reed horizon.

  The rest followed hurriedly, afraid of being left behind in this cold and smelly swamp. As they left, one by one they subtracted every shade of green and blue so that when the last macaw was gone there was nothing but gray and brown and darkness left in the marsh, with the crackle of fire to the north and sulfurous sodium lights to the west and the sullen sharpening of smog to mark where the sun was trying to climb hand-over-hand out of Massachusetts.