Contraband Page 4

For a long time the pilot watched the curl of smog and smoke into which the birds had flown. A slim figure in a World War I flying helmet and two shoulderbags, standing against the soiled dawn.

  He was still watching when a voice behind him said:

  ‘Palm Beach, Nantucket, da Marsh.’

  The pilot’s muscles froze.

  ‘Me say befo’ time, Smegs, soon come pezzogrossos in Boeing, tourism, sure thing.’

  He forced himself to move as slowly as swaying grasses. Checked his chartcase and ECM-pak were still firm on his shoulders. Then swung to face the voice.

  At first he saw nothing but bulrushes, cattails. After a couple of seconds he picked out a pattern, then three, seven. The shapes were human, but not right. Even in the gloomy dawn he could see that.

  One of the faces seemed to sag to the left. An arm was thick and crusty with burns.

  A leg jointed in mid-thigh.

  The shapes all wore tall rubber boots, and jumpsuits, with dark blankets covering the shoulders. Crooked sticks hung at their elbows. Clothes, boots, flesh were all stained black with smoke and muck. Their heads were completely bald.

  Jumpers, the pilot thought, and reached toward his right boot.

  *

  No one knew where the Jumpers had come from.

  All the pilot knew was this:

  Once upon a time, the real estate divisions of large organizations – certain banks, investment groups, the Gambinos – became aware they had run out of space, for they had covered virtually every piece of developable waterfront with their resorts, their condos, their Kmart Colonials. The only waterfront left lay in the salt marshes of the East Coast.

  So they started filling in the marshland.

  The federal government, responding to a passing environmental guilt, put a brake on the filling.

  The organizations, to show who was boss, brought in the Jumpers.

  The Jumpers were the id of industrial America, the toilet fixation behind the junk-bond markets, the despised and essential sewermen for a society obsessed, one way or another, with the production and hoarding of shit.

  More specifically, the Jumpers dumped poison. You sent for Jumpers when a rod of fissile jammed in a hot reactor core and you couldn’t pull it out by normal means. The new Mobs – the Netas, the Guyanese, the Spirit Knife-Organizatsni compact – all hired Jumpers whenever they had to dump chemicals so illegal, so perilous that even their own scum wouldn’t touch them.

  The Jumpers didn’t mind the danger. They had grown up toxic. Many of them were children of the first poisoning grounds. Their parents had settled in places like Love Canal, the Nevada test zone, the bayou dumps. They had worked at TMI and Millstone One. They’d been vaccinated with hazardous waste. Because of this they had no hope, they were beyond despair, their pride was the pride of zero. In fact they adopted a kind of reverse chic out of toxicity. They alone had the courage to handle what everyone else feared to touch. They entered reactor cores with torn suits and when they came out proudly nailed the maxed radiation discs to the plastic walls of their trailers and cabin cruisers. They competed to dump the used needles, the white urine, the slivered yellow tumors from the stigs clinics, the Plague hospitals; burst-plopping the biohazard at night into the frail wetlands of Wilmington, Port Elizabeth, Quonset.

  The Jumpers lived where they dumped. They had come to resemble their habitat, and vice versa. The Jumper’s Hell was of one dimension, where variety was the first casualty and all difference was twisted. It was a hell of smoke and tar and blackest acid, where the chemicals had soaked in so deep that they burst into flame on their own, feeding on lifeforms they had already killed, glowing forever underground, underwater, under the sickened grasses.

  But something was new here – and this was something the pilot did not know. Something was changing in this place. Hell was being, if not attenuated, at least given a vector.

  For a prophet was coming from the Marsh. Soon from the ranks of the already-dead would rise one who had been buried, and changed, and lived. And for him to rise in a suitable manner was going to take scratch, and lots of it.

  For this reason, the Jumpers wanted the fallen plane.

  Chapter Five

  Boarding Party Pissaladiere

  Five cloves pre-chopped garlic

  extra virgin olive oil

  1 pound pre-chopped onions

  jar of anchovies

  twenty Kalamata olives

  pizza dough

  Prepare dough ahead of time. Keep cool in ice chest. As soon as you grok the cutter – as soon as you hear the first off-key transmission – break out onions and garlic. Immediately heat olive oil in large skillet and sauté chopped onions with lots of pepper, sea salt, thyme, and rosemary, adding garlic later. Keep cooking till smell fills boat and onions are mostly done. When the BON boarding-party launches its inflatable, add garlic. Spread dough in 8x10-inch pan. Puncture with fork. Spread onion mixture and cover with anchovy fillets and sliced olives. Cook in 360-degree oven for one half hour. The smell of onions, garlic, and pepper should be enough to keep BON search-dogs from sniffing out any well-wrapped weed. After boarding-party has left, cut into small squares and serve with dry white Côtes du Rhone.

  Hawkley

  The Freetrader’s Almanac and Cookbook

  The pilot thought of what he knew of all this as he watched the Jumpers. He was not reassured. These people had nothing to lose and they would kill strangers for the fun of it.

  The one called Smegs had no right hand. He pushed the reeds aside with his left arm and said, ‘For why you groundin’ Boeing in the Marsh, amigo?’

  ‘Meltdown, mon.’ The pilot reverted automatically to Lingua. Lingua was the jive of the streets, of the black market. It was the language of Darkworld. ‘Me losin’ bullgine high-up.’

  A couple more Jumpers squelched out of the spartina. One of them was the sag-faced man; now the pilot could distinguish the tumor, like a huge brown crab under the skin, stretching his chin and cheeks.

  The stick-like objects were luparas, sawn-off automatic shotguns, slung from the shoulder on harnesses made from old inner tubes.

  ‘Freeze wid da shiv, babe,’ one of them warned. It was a woman’s voice, though the face was black and flinty, the scalp smooth as the rest.

  The pilot straightened. Workboots, it seemed, were not the place to hide a switchblade.

  The Jumper with the sagging face moved. The barrel of his lupara made a circle and appeared in his fist, pointing at the pilot’s stomach.

  ‘Okay, slimeball,’ he said. ‘Gracias for the Boeing. Now git—’

  A battering of air behind the pilot interrupted his words.

  The eyes of the one-handed Jumper, the one called Smegs, grew big as dollar-coins.

  The pilot felt his guts sink. He turned around to see the macaws shining in the upper sunlight, dropping toward the plane, greens first. They were coming home, he thought irrationally.

  ‘Funny pigeons,’ the tumor man said, and aimed his lupara at the lead macaw which was helicoptering in for a landing on the Citation’s canted tail.

  ‘Stop!’ the pilot shouted, raising his arms in protest toward the Jumper, certain there was no hope. What difference would one more small death make in this wasteland; but support came from an unexpected quarter.

  ‘No shoot, bro’.’ Smegs was looking at the tumor man. His shotgun had come off his shoulder; with his one hand he held the butt against the joint in his thigh, pointing in the tumor man’s general direction.

  ‘Que?’ The tumor man’s mouth hung open.

  The woman pushed forward. She stepped onto a rotten piling to gain height.

  ‘Who the capo heah? Doctor Filth, is who, pizhdal.’ Her mouth smiled toothless. She pointed at the tumor man; Doctor Filth.

  ‘Toad’s right.’ Another Jumper stepped out of the lee of a junked Yugo sedan. This one wore a bandanna over his bald skull, and a ripped jumpsuit. Open sores wept redly down his chest.

  ‘So fuck you, Sme
gs,’ Doctor Filth grunted. He jammed the lupara’s sights against his tumor, squinted down the short barrel, and fired.

  The blasts were huge, and double. The air sang with concussion. The pilot spun around.

  A cloud of bright feathers hung in the smoke, and drifted down a ray of dawnlight toward the mud. ‘Oh, dag,’ the pilot said, certain it was the Jesuit bird. He swung back toward the Jumpers, his face emptied by anger – and choked.

  A half-dozen luparas were leveled in every direction, at him, at other Jumpers. They had all hit the deck with luparas aimed from the shelter of cattails, from the wrecked Yugo; Mexican stand-off of double-ought buck and one Jumper torn backward against a rusted barrel embedded in the muck, a can with many red markings and the words ‘DANGER’ and ‘2, 3, 7, 8 tetrachlor . . . P-dioxin’ showing even through the corrosion; the Jumper half-sitting against the barrel, kicking absentmindedly, blood crawling down the metal, turning the rust black, making streaks in the gray mud – the tumor surgically removed along with the rest of his face.

  ‘Capish, Toad?’ the man called Smegs yelled at the woman. ‘Doctor Filth no problem nah.’ He poked the barrel of his lupara at her.

  The pilot scrambled up the fuselage. The rest of the macaws had split with the shooting. He could not see the dead bird. It had been blown into the high grass.

  Smegs got to his feet. He broke the lupara, slipped another round into the magazine, hung it over his shoulder. His one hand, using the double-jointed thigh as fulcrum and friction-hold, worked as fast as two. He moved with a curious, sliding gait, into the filling stinking canyon where the jet had landed. He picked a bright jade feather out of the black water. He stared at it for a minute, then looked up at the pilot, his face distorted in rage.

  ‘Mira what you done,’ he screamed. ‘You happy now?’

  The pilot looked around him. The rest of the Jumpers had got to their feet and were watching him carefully, their luparas still pointing at each other. All except for Toad, who leaned her shotgun against the barrel, and kneeled by Doctor Filth’s side.

  ‘Me just take bindle,’ the pilot croaked. He cleared his throat. ‘Just three cases—’

  ‘Cabron!’ The Jumper with the weeping sores spat the word out. He brought his shotgun up so the barrels yawned emptiness right into the pilot’s eyes. ‘Git-go! Chop-chop! Andalay!’

  The pilot paused, a beat. His head was light, his eyes burned. The fever was gaining on him.

  He kneeled to touch the plane’s cold aluminum. A farewell feel-up.

  Then, discreetly checking that his ECM-pak and chartcase hung solidly on the shoulder, he slid down onto the wing on the far side of the aircraft, and stepped carefully into the marsh, into the spartina and bulrushes.

  The footing was uneven, soft. The mud burbled around his boots, letting go of a billion tiny corruptions.

  He took another step. Foul liquid slopped over the tops of his workboots, and he grimaced. Already the Citation was half hidden in the reeds.

  Behind him, Smegs had climbed to the top of the fuselage, still holding the macaw feather between index and thumb.

  ‘It’s what you get,’ the Jumper shouted at him. ‘That’s what you get.’

  As he sank deeper into the reeds he could still hear Smegs shouting after him.

  ‘That’s what you get,’ Smegs was screaming, ‘you bring something pretty into da Marsh!’

  Chapter Six

  ‘The smuggler needs a forwarding office he can trust, with a shit-hot beeper system. He needs an online privacy service if he’s going to do any slip-’n’-slide through the ’nets. Good forwarding and privacy services will not only warn him if things melt down, they will also provide an airlock between the freetrader and all the jive of the outside world.’

  Hawkley

  The Freetrader’s Almanac and Cookbook

  When the pilot got back to the City he went straight to his apartment on the ninety-sixth floor of the TransCom Building.

  He plugged the ECM-pak into its recharger, and flipped the circuit breakers back to ‘on’.

  Then he got into his bunk and let the fever take him, shake him, and scour him out.

  The apartment was not legal. It was actually a lounge, bathroom, shower, and kitchenette area built for the twenty-four-hour technicians who had once worked a TV studio under the building’s pointed spire.

  The TV people had worked for the TransCom broadcasting system. When TransCom merged with X-Corp, and all their programming was diverted into X-Corp’s high-speed B-Net cable system, the studio shut down. The TV broadcasting antennas were removed. Automatic microwave cellphone transceivers and airconditioning ducts were installed in the studio’s place. The door to the lounge was blocked. Everyone forgot about the space except Obregon, the building manager.

  Obregon opened a secret entrance through the airco. He made up new building plans, removing all trace of the lounge, and put the space on the market as a one-bedroom apartment.

  The place was perfect for the pilot. Like the pilot, it did not officially exist. Like the pilot, it required a fake ID; whoever used it had to be ‘hired’ by Obregon as a part-time security guard to account for his presence in the building.

  The place also suited the pilot for personal reasons. Its narrow windows faced east and south. They went halfway around the base of the spire, and gave it the safe, watching feel of a large cockpit.

  The spire was protected by mythic creatures, ten-foot-high griffins, gargoyles, serpents, and dragons cast of stainless steel by the Krupp works in Essen, Germany. These creatures appealed to the pilot’s deepest identity, for his parents were Czech, and had raised him on middle European folktales; myths where dragons and griffins ruled the earth, and men never asked themselves what they were going to do with their lives, or should they go to Wharton and study business telecommunications, but instead got on with the business of hunting down and wasting monsters as soon as they were old enough to lift a sword.

  Now, lying on the couch, level with the windows, the pilot thought he saw these stainless steel creatures move, and flex, and take off in slow silent flaps of horned wings.

  In his hot mind he followed them; cruising the canyons of liquid-crystal and light; patrolling the metalled rivers; sending their hungry shadows over the microscopic beings that jaywalked, hailed cabs, and ran crazily to predictable rhythms.

  Sometimes (he imagined) the griffins would stoop, dive to pick up some junior vice-president screaming from the pavement, haul him up to a corporate cornice to peck out his liver while dozens of floppies containing focus-group reports and marketing forecasts spun away cleanly in the wind.

  The fever hallucinations bled into each other. The dragons turned into pigeons, the pigeons into brightly colored macaws, the macaws into alloy airplanes shaking themselves to death at eleven thousand feet while the instruments dissolved into green-silver cloud and the controls came apart in his hands.

  But above and behind the fever-dreams hung a new and constant awareness; someone, behind the clouds, behind the blank windows, watching; someone with no face and all frequencies. Someone who knew who he was, and where he was going, despite all the tricks and cunning and electronic devices the pilot used to hide himself.

  There were periods of waking and lucidity. During such periods, the pilot drank Letuva vodka, popped tetracycline, and reread his favorite books, volumes by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Night Flight and The Little Prince.

  Even when he was asleep he kept the ECM-pak on, hooked into one of the spire’s disused antennas. Listening through his flying helmet to cop cruisers, airline traffic, the occasional terse cipher from BON transmitters at the old DEA Central on West 57th.

  Sometimes he switched the pak to one of the Wildnets, going through a cellphone link, through a privacy service in Reno, and finally into one of those systems of SAPs – Secure-Access Providers, with their Fedchip transponders illegally disabled – that people said were too fast, too scrambled, and too numerous to be broken by NSA software in
the short time they’d have to do it.

  At the top of the ECM screen the vast background traffic of the Web hung like a multicolored, pointillist sky in which every molecule of air represented both one site, and the dendritic threads linking it to other sites; all pulsing, contracting, expanding, undulating, like something alive and huge.

  But he did not surf upward, into the Web. Instead, staying below, among the SAPs, he set the parameters to traffic and visual scan, keeping an eye on Usegroup sites where freetraders hung out to exchange contacts or gossip.

  The green lines on his display indicated heavy back-and-forth traffic. The black signified one-way messages, unanswered or unanswerable.

  Maybe it was his mood, the somber brain-chemicals of sickness, but the Wildnets seemed to the pilot to be heavy on the black side; the intricate flowers and tapestries marking free-trade data streams resembled those dark jellyfish that live in chasms in the southern Atlantic, linking up with tens of thousands of their like to form a wall of soft, somber, translucent tissue; pulsing, growing, weaving their inky tentacles around the fragile green.

  He switched off traffic-scan after a couple of minutes. As a matter of principle he did not believe in unbreakable security, especially in a medium as wide-open as Wildnets. One-point-four minutes, the Bible said, was the minimum time needed for trace on a nonsecure channel. Anyway, he could barely keep his eyes open that long.

  Once a day Obregon brought him food from the take-away Cuban-Chinese restaurant on 28th Street. The body battled infection on fuel of pork chow mein, Habana-style; fried plantains, duck sauce.

  The abscess in his finger spread pink pressure to his knuckles. On the third day, it burst, releasing clear liquid and two clusters of tiny, translucent grapes. He recognized the larvae of the Amazonian chiggoe fly, and washed the wound out in Letuva.

  The fever broke on the fourth night in a dream of hedgehogs. When he woke up, Obregon was standing at the windows, watching morning traffic loose smoke on the East River bridges.