Angels of Vengeance

wearing the uniform, slipped past her with a much-prized PlayStation 3. The stupid toy probably cost those sailors their combined pay for the last six months, and now they’d have to start saving for the games. Whatever happened to blowing your money on hookers and tattoos? She shook her head as she threaded through a kerbside shiatsu parlour - three massage tables, all occupied, just dropped into the crush of foot traffic like stones in a river.

Jules stopped outside a noodle house to reorient herself, needing to make sure she was still headed towards the cigar stand Shah said the Rhino used. She’d had no luck at the marina earlier, and was now working her way through a list of his haunts. She remembered, on their long run out of New York, that the old chief had talked about signing up for another hitch himself. Aged fifty-two, he was still relatively young, and twenty years in the Coast Guard would count in his favour with the Navy. But of course, even if he did make it in, he might well end up on some old tub, trawling up and down the Atlantic coast running anti-piracy patrols, instead of serving on board something like the Bataan. There’d be retraining, and he’d have to serve the needs of the US Navy, not the other way around. He wouldn’t even get his former Coast Guard rank back - be lucky to get petty officer third-class, in fact. All of that rubbish plus zero desire on his part to find himself back on the East Coast anytime soon had swiftly put an end to thoughts of re-enlistment. Like her, the Rhino’s main desire after the clusterfuck in Manhattan was a quiet life.

He’d broken the news at the bar of the Idler, shortly after they’d sailed ‘the lake’ yet again, leaving the US for good, landing in Sydney, hoping that Cesky had no pull so far away from Seattle.

‘Best bet for this particular megafaunal rarity is to stay hunkered the fuck down, as low as my massive horn will permit, Miss Jules. And I hunker best on my lonesome.’

Thus, while she’d tried to blend into the cashed-up refugee scene in Sydney, paying her way with a few salvaged trinkets, he’d fetched up in Darwin, the northernmost city of Australia, at the arse end of the world; a weird, frontier boom town that had doubled in size, doubled again, then doubled again in the years since 2003. Military and civilian alike, tens of thousands of the Rhino’s fellow Americans had come here, drifting down - or sometimes running headlong - from the chaos that swept through Asia after the Disappearance.

Darwin hosted former CEOs of merchant banks and vice-presidents of software companies who now worked as debt collectors, truck drivers in uranium mines, or labourers on the huge government farms out on the Ord River. Like a lot of frontier towns, Darwin was a rude, bruising, crossroads settlement, full of chancers, thieves and standover men. It was a good place to get lost and that, he’d told her, was fine by him. There was nothing back home for Rhino A. Ross, just burnt bridges and enemies. Or one enemy in particular, at least, one worth the effort of losing himself down here with all of the other losers.

Jules squinted into the fierce sun as she left behind the cover of a wide veranda awning that shaded the front of an Irish-themed pub - the thematic verisimilitude provided by a couple of drunken Paddies beating each other to death with bar stools just inside the swinging doors. Above, a pair of Marine Harriers off the Bataan flew over and drowned out all background noise momentarily with the howl of their engines. She searched her shirt pockets for the pair of faux Gucci sunglasses she’d picked up that morning, but seemed to have lost them. She was worried about the Rhino, and not just because of what had happened to her back in Sydney. When they’d gone their separate ways, he’d seemed bleak and beaten down, which was not at all his natural state of being. She had only been in Darwin a few hours, but already she knew it to be the sort of place people went when they thought they’d run out of options.

Six lanes of traffic pulsed and crawled along Perrett Street, although calling the arrangement ‘lanes’ implied more order than was really the case. In effect, two thick, snaking streams of vehicles, each about three cars across, ground past each other, sometimes mingling, even crunching together as horns blared and drivers hurled abuse into the hot, grey sky in a couple of dozen languages. Again she heard American voices everywhere, shouting down or trying to shout down the flat, nasal ‘strine’ of the locals, or the chittering tonal curses of Chinese, Tagalog or Javanese motorists. A siren wailed somewhere, but never seemed to move, and heat shimmered over the bodies of the cars, rolling through her as though she’d stepped in front of an open furnace door.

She used her elbows and shoulders to force a path through the crowds that spilled out into the fringes of the traffic jam, leading to more near misses and abuse. Part of the problem was the lack of any real division between road and kerb; but also there were just too many people attempting to force their way through too small a space.

‘Another perfect day,’ Julianne muttered to herself as she fought through the heaving masses of sour, sweating bodies on a sidewalk that had reverted to rammed earth. The city still hadn’t got around to paving the New Town development, and water trucks rolled through every couple of hours, spraying, to settle the dust down until the monsoon arrived in late afternoon to turn it to mud. If the monsoon arrived. Mostly they did, but even now the weather remained unpredictable.

*

He felt a little better being mobile again and heading towards a meal. With any sort of luck, he’d get paid this afternoon when Hughie came back from the seafood markets with their cut from the week’s haul. With a wad of the folding stuff in his pocket, a decent feed, and maybe a nap to sleep off the worst of the daytime drink, he might even turn his mind to the depressing topic of what next.

The Rhino had been in Darwin for three months and in that time he’d done no more than establish the flimsiest toehold. The free port was one of the busiest, most kinetic places he’d been to since the Disappearance. Vast flows of money and people passed through here, and the power structure of the city was constantly shifting, protean, moving in time with the erratic tidal changes that the fall of America had sent washing around the globe. As much as the presence of thousands of US servicemen and women created the impression that Seattle was the big dog around here, the Rhino knew differently.

We’re just the dumb muscle, he figured, like a boxer who’s taken too many hits to the head. They’ll keep us around until they don’t need the help, and then we’ll get flushed like a used condom.

The real power here took the form of Indian money-changers and the former Chinese Communist Party bosses, legions of them, who’d survived the civil war and transformed themselves into princes of the middle kingdom’s coastal megacities. These old CCP chiefs rarely appeared on the streets on Darwin. But the city seemed to clench in on itself whenever they arrived in numbers. They flew in and choppered straight out to the rooftop landing pad of the new Mirvac Mirage Hotel in the old city, there to contend for the mountains of coal, iron ore, gold and uranium being raked out of the earth’s oldest continent. And, perhaps even more crucially, to bid for the crops of one of the few reliable large-scale food exporters left in the world.

The Rhino rubbed a massive paw over his face, flicking droplets of salty sweat onto the dirt in front of him. Traffic crawled along the gravel road, raising a miasma of red dust that slightly dulled the fierce sunburst glinting off chrome and tinted windshields. He grinned at the plight of two black stretch Hummer limos trapped in the slow- moving snarl. Small flags hung limp from their aerials: the new red and gold ensign of the South American Federation. Newcomers in town and utterly clueless with it. He wondered what had brought them all the way here. It wasn’t as though Roberto’s operation lacked for resources. Sprawled across the territories of half-a-dozen former states, the Federation was ridiculously wealthy, at least in potential. It remained a prison camp, however, with the Colombian gangster-turned-dictator still smashing his fist down wherever he thought he detected the slightest opposition.

Although he knew it was foolish, even a little conceited, the Rhino faded away from the gutter and back into the crush of the crowd, not wanting to be seen by the occupants of the diplomatic convoy. They were probably just in town to negotiate with a few of the local mining companies, offering a generous cut of the profits if the Australians, or increasingly the South African companies who were moving here, would assist in restarting production at any one of the Federacion‘s hundreds of projects that had imploded during the general collapse. It was also possible that they were here to see about joining the Alliance - but he didn’t think the current member states would be game for that. Seattle still had enough clout, just barely, to block any membership bid.

The Rhino had witnessed part of the collapse first-hand, when Acapulco, the Mexican port on the southern fringe of the Wave, fell apart. And almost certainly alone among the masses of people swarming through Darwin, he’d played a small role in the rise of el Presidente por Vida, Roberto Morales. In those days - an age ago in less than five years - Roberto had been nothing but a small-time local hood, fortunate enough to score a sweet deal providing muscle to a couple of the more expensive resorts, such as the Fairmont. Fortunate