Without warning

friend.’

‘Makes sense,’ Jules replied with a shrug. ‘Maritime criminality was Shoeless Dan’s special power.’ She spun the wheel to take them on a long, looping course around a paddle-steamer that had somehow found itself blundering through the waves. It was nearly as badly overcrowded as the sunken garbage barge had been, and she wanted to give them a very wide berth. ‘But there’s not much of a piracy culture around here,’ she added. ‘Not like in parts of Asia. A lot of smuggling, yes, but not piracy. The Americans wouldn’t have allowed it, even in Mexican waters. You think somebody’s branching out? I mean, not that we’ll be hanging around long enough for them to try their luck.’

The huge Gurkha bobbed and ducked quite comically to maintain his balance, without once needing to grab on to anything to steady himself. ‘You will if you insist on hugging the coastline to drop Pieraro’s people anywhere, Miss Julianne,’ he said.

Jules frowned testily. ‘Look, I’m really pissed off about that. But I didn’t see any way around it. Miguel had that Colombian nutter holding the crowds off us and he could have very easily put us right in the poo if I’d cut up rough about his mariachi band.’

‘His what?’

‘Sorry. In-joke.’

Fifi produced another beer from an icebox on the flying deck and winked at Shah. ‘They’re cool with me,’ she said. ‘I think they’re cute. Wanna brew, anyone?’

Both Jules and Shah answered at once: ‘No.’

‘They’re not American citizens,’ the Englishwoman continued. ‘They’re peasants. Nobody is going to take them in as genuine refugees. Even if we can get all the way across the Pacific with the rations we have on board – and, look, I suppose we can – Hawaii will not take them. They’re shedding people at the moment. New Zealand might. Australia won’t. And everybody else is just as likely to open fire on us as soon as we sail into view.’

Shah held both hands up as if to show her he had nothing left. ‘I do not presume to tell you what you should do. But you have hired me to provide security, and I advise you now that heading back towards the coastline will be a very dangerous business.’

‘Fifi, you’ve been out on the Rules with Lee a lot more than me. How’s our provisioning?’

She drained half of the beer and burped. ‘’Scuse me. It’s not bad, Julesy,’ she replied. That golfer had some good shit in the fridge, and plenty of it. And we topped up the larder nicely. There’s like two frozen pigs and couple of steer down there now. Plus, them Mexicans did bring plenty of food – not like those other fucking snobs. All they brought was expensive luggage and heaps of attitude. I don’t see a problem. Really. Come on, it’ll be fun. Be like Carnivale every night.’

Jules looked to Shah for support but he remained entirely impassive. ‘I just… it’s just that…’ she faltered. ‘Oh, I don’t know… my father taught me that helping people was wrong. It never ends well. We’re not philanthropists here, we’re smugglers – at best.’

‘Foxy fucking smugglers.’ Fifi saluted Julianne with her bottle. ‘And anyway, your old man ate his pistol one night just before the cops grabbed him. Should you really be looking to him for advice?’

Jules looked completely lost. ‘That was my mother’s fault,’ she said bitterly. ‘If she hadn’t tipped off Scotland Yard about Daddy diddling the tax man…’

Shah regarded her with some confusion. ‘Your mother informed on your father?’ he asked.

‘After a less than satisfying divorce settlement failed to provide for her in the style to which she’d so been looking forward,’ Jules explained. She was surprised to find it hard to speak, with her throat suddenly locking. ‘I was his favourite,’ she said quietly.

* * * *

34

KUWAIT INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, KUWAIT CITY

The sutures in his butt made it all but impossible to run, and for a ‘running high’ junkie like Bret Melton, that was becoming every bit as uncomfortable as his assorted injuries. ‘You’ll have to excuse my irritability, Sadie. I’ve been folded, spindled and mutilated. Puts a man in a poor frame of mind.’

The Al Jazeera correspondent clicked his coffee cup against Melton’s and smiled. The Army Times reporter was pathetically grateful to him for getting him out of that hangar in the boonies. ‘It is nothing, really,’ Mirsaad replied. ‘Look at what is happening to the world. And you are worried about your manners.’

‘Well, perhaps if people were possessed of a few more manners, they wouldn’t go around killing each other with such abandon.’

Sayad al Mirsaad’s eyes flickered nervously around the departure lounge. Kuwait International Airport was swarming with armed personnel from a dozen different countries, mostly American, however, and the atmosphere was twitchy and dangerous. Dense knots of travellers, civilian and military, crowded around every available television screen to follow the war news. There had already been one unpleasant incident where Mirsaad had been recognised from a report he’d just filed on the sinking of the USS Hopper. A couple of Marines didn’t think he was suitably respectful in tone and Melton had been forced to intervene before the little Jordanian got stomped. It had put the American in a bad mood, arguing with his own people, even if they were a couple of Podunk assholes who would have left the world a better place had they stayed home and been zapped by the Wave. He’d been snappy and irritable ever since, and his inability to break out of the blue funk simply made it all the worse.

He needed to piss, his wounded hand throbbed like a bastard, and he’d had no sleep since the first Israeli warhead had gone off. He was grateful to Sayad for hauling his ass out of TRANSCOM limbo, especially so given the business-class ticket, paid for by BBC World, that his colleague had handed him.

‘You’re off to London, you lucky devil,’ Mirsaad had said as he handed over the precious travel wallet. ‘You don’t deserve it, of course, what with your whoring and drinking and your disgraceful attitude to the Prophet and his faithful. I should really be going in your place. After all, I am much more virtuous.’