Without warning

‘la catбstrofe’, and watching the strange, ghostly track of those five ships to the north, Pete Holder felt as though time had folded back in on itself.

‘I dunno what’s happened,’ he said, ‘but I’ve got a sick feeling about this. And about that weird fucking storm front. I’m gonna go with my gut. Mr Lee, let’s make ready for a fast run, sou’-sou’-west. Keep a watch on the Pong Su. If nothing changes, we’re gonna blow this off in fifteen minutes. I want to put some serious miles between us and… whatever.’

* * * *

The Diamantina slipped through a light swell, pushed south-southwest by a freshening breeze. Mr Lee had the wheel, as phlegmatic in the face of world’s end as he had been staring down the barrel of an M16 in Bali. Pete wondered what, if anything, would upset him. Not that it mattered, because between himself and the Twins there was plenty of freaking out to go around.

‘Zombie Jew on a fucking Zimmer frame,’ cursed Fifi.

‘What?’

‘It’s redneck for “Christ on a crutch”, Pete. Let’s stay on the ball, shall we?’ said Jules.

The three smugglers were crouched in front of the Samsung monitor, a brand new 23-inch flat screen Pete had picked up back in La Paz during a night of tequila shots and hard bartering with an Italian yachtsman of long acquaintance. CNN’s Asian bureau, reporting out of the network’s regional HQ in Hong Kong, was running in a small window that took up about a quarter of the screen. Jules had plugged into the live web feed via an iridium phone, and if they watched it much longer they’d need all the counterfeit money in the hold to pay this month’s bill. If it ever arrived.

Pete’s eyes flicked over to the GPS window, which showed them retreating from the abandoned rendezvous with the Pong Su at eleven knots. The North Korean ship was still describing a long, lazy arc that would eventually see it run aground somewhere near Mazatlan, in the next day or so. Pete, the only one of them to have a seat in front of the display, had to rub his eyes. Like an addicted gamer, he’d been staring so hard at the screen he hadn’t blinked in a long while. He shook his head as he rubbed the irritation away, his vision blurring slightly when he refocused on the window in which footage of a major highway crash was now being shown.

He couldn’t get his head around these pictures, which had come in from a small Canadian news team – some guys out of Quebec, according to the dateline. The image seemed to be out of focus or something. He could tell they were looking at a big pile-up on a six-lane highway, but everything was indistinct, as though viewed through poorly blown glass.

‘The effect is stationary,’ the heavily accented Quebecois voice-over assured everyone. ‘Mounted Police at the scene are not allowing anyone to approach the phenomenon after the loss of the two fire engines.’

Blurred, wavering vision of two fire tenders came up, both of them overturned in a deep ditch by the side of the road. A few hundred metres beyond them, a large pile-up of vehicles burned freely.

‘Oh man, this is really putting the zap on my head,’ Fifi muttered.

‘We need to think this through,’ said Jules, in her oddly cool, high-tone manner. ‘This could be quite awful.’

Pete rubbed at his three-day beard, completely lost for an answer. For a few minutes, a little earlier, he’d actually thought of heading north to raid an empty city. He could have sailed into Santa Monica and picked up a super-yacht, provisioned her for a year, filled the leftover space with jewels and ammo. But CNN had convinced him otherwise. It was abundantly clear that you could go into the ‘storm front’ that had appeared to their north, but you’d never come back. What was the old Argentinian phrase? It ‘disappeared’ people.

‘I think we might shoot through to my old stomping ground,’ he said. ‘Hobart looks far enough away to me. And I know people there. We can move this money in a flash.’

‘But what if it starts growing?’ asked Fifi, with a sharp edge to her voice. ‘What if it just eats up the whole world, like the Blob or something?’

Pete gave her his most open, honest face. ‘Then we’re fucked, darlin’. Aren’t we?’

‘Pete…’ It was Jules, if anything looking even more concerned than before. The worry lines between her eyes were virtual canyons now. ‘How fast can we get to Hobart?’

‘Why?’ he asked. Jules had a post-graduate degree in keeping a stiff upper lip, probably thanks to her old man. If she thought something even worse was coming their way, it really didn’t bear thinking about.

‘Because nobody will want greenbacks if Uncle Sam’s beamed up to the Enterprise and flown away for good.’

The bow of the yacht sliced into the face of a larger than normal wave, throwing them all slightly off balance. The Diamantina climbed up and over the crest, slamming down hard on the far side with a great, hollow boom. Fifi and Jules braced themselves against the nearest bulkhead. Pete hung on to the arms of his chair. On the computer screen, Stan Grant interviewed a physicist from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, but Pete Holder had already tuned out. Jules had a point: if this was a permanent deal, they had very little time before their hard-earned stick was worth less than a handful of Polish zlotys.

‘You’re right,’ he said tonelessly. ‘We have to get back onshore and change our money over. Do we know if the Caymans are affected? Or the Canal?’

‘We can find out,’ Jules replied, nodding at the screen. ‘But Pete, I don’t think we can get there in time. We have to get onshore as soon as we can. Somewhere big enough to convert the money, but far enough removed from whatever it is, that blind panic hasn’t taken over yet.’

‘Acapulco’s still there,’ said Fifi. ‘But they’re locked down, accordin’ to the radio.’

‘That might be a good thing,’ shrugged Jules. ‘If they keep a lid on things long enough, we might just get in and out. Otherwise we’ll have to run down to Guatemala or El Salvador.’

Pete chewed his lower lip, sucking the salt from it as he pondered the unfolding disaster. A window displaying the Google news page refreshed, informing him that nearly three thousand stories had already been filed on the phenomenon – none of them from North America. The bright blue hyperlinks all led to European and Asian sites. One, from Agence France-Presse, reported that trading had been suspended on the London, Tokyo and Sydney stock exchanges. Just beneath it, a Novosti report from Moscow claimed that the Russian armed forces had all been