By this time, luckily, Miyoko was wrapping up her speech. The next part of our broadcast was to be the mermaid footage, safe in the computers in Tokyo. I was so grateful, in that moment, for those Tokyo computers, so grateful for the TV producers Miyoko implicitly trusted. I was so grateful for technology, for social networking even, and also for our Thompson, that Navy SEAL Santa, with his distracting incendiary devices and surprising skills of stealth.
We looked to Thompson now, all of us did. Chip did, I did, and even Gina did. We expected great things of him.
“Outmanned and outgunned,” was what he said, shrugging.
Miyoko was the one who told us what to do.
“Don’t stop filming,” she said. “Rick. Turn the camera. Film the soldiers. Keep it rolling. No matter what. We’re still live. We’re still broadcasting.”
And then she said something, I guess to her viewers, in Japanese, and Rick swung the camera around and pointed it right at the soldiers.
On they came till they were right beside us. Maybe twenty soldiers on foot, and more in the jeeps. Some soldiers jumped out of the jeeps. Among them were a couple of civilians—a man in a suit and the woman who’d pretended to be Mormonish, then fully reneged on it.
“I’m sorry,” said the non-Mormon, but her tone wasn’t apologetic. Not one bit. “Do you have a permit for whatever it is that you’re doing?”
“We’re hotel guests,” said Gina. “We have a perfect right to be here. Or do you tell all your guests they can’t set foot on your beach? Is that your policy?”
“You should know we’re broadcasting live,” added Chip. “Millions of Japanese viewers are watching this.”
The soldiers unhooked their guns from their shoulders and, in an unhurried way, lifted and more or less pointed them. At us.
I’d never had a gun pointed at me, other than a paint gun at a corporate retreat, and I have to say it felt more personal than you might think. It seemed it’d be far too easy for one of those guys to pull the trigger. Glocks, I’d heard, had hair triggers on them, cops shot themselves in the foot with those things, just taking them out of the holsters. These weren’t Glocks, though, I told myself—Glocks were mostly handguns. Weren’t they?
Words were what we had, I told myself. Words were the only weapons that we had, since the numchucks hadn’t come in handy, and this was the time to deploy them.
“You should also know,” I said, maybe a little shakily, “that we’ve sent them the video footage. A major TV station in Japan. They have it and they’re showing it. The Japanese are seeing the mermaids, too. The Japanese know.”
“You’ll have to stop what you’re doing and come along with us,” said the man in the suit.
He did look paler, didn’t he? Now that we’d told him about the people of Japan?
“This is how you want to be introduced to the world?” said Gina. “Really, Mr. Corporate Asshole? Does the term Facebook mean anything to you? The term Twitter? To say nothing of the lawsuits your company will be facing. We have a litigator lined up already, in D.C. Meyers & Finkelstein. Kidnapping of a U.S. citizen, just for starters. And trust me, that’s only the very tip of that iceberg.”
Miyoko spoke in Japanese. She was talking about the soldiers and the suits and who paid their bills, she told me later, and though what she said was pretty damning she smiled brightly throughout.
“You think people will come to see your mermaid zoo once they know how you started it? Like this?” asked Chip. “Kidnappings? Guns? They’ll boycott it. You’ll be notorious. And how about Nancy? She was the one who found them. And she wanted the mermaids to be like Darwin’s finches. Not—not Barnum & Bailey’s poor old elephants. These mermaids were her discovery.”
I felt proud of Chip, then, for his eloquence.
Miyoko translated for her audience, keeping up a rapid patter while the suit leaned close to the woman, whispering something.
“Stand down,” said Thompson loudly, in the direction of the soldiers. He had his balls back, suddenly. “You’re on the wrong side here. I am an officer of the United States Navy.”
One or two of the soldiers looked at each other insecurely.
“Then you’ve got exactly no jurisdiction here,” said the man in the suit.
“He’s just a retiree,” sneered the woman.
“You think I don’t have strings to pull, lady?” said Thompson. “I’ve got some strings. Don’t force me to pull them.”
“You don’t have strings,” she said. “You’ve got no strings at all. Now who’s the bullshitter.”
“That far out isn’t territorial waters,” said Thompson. “It’s still in the Exclusive Economic Zone, sure, but it’s contiguous zone, where those coral heads are. I measured it.”
I turned and stared at him, then back at the corporates. I wasn’t sure what Thompson was talking about. But the suit looked like maybe he knew.
“Last night,” he went on. “I measured it last night. It’s only inside the territorial zone, see, that they have a crystal-clear right to tell everyone else what to do. Assuming they’re in cahoots with the cops, a.k.a. what passes for government in the BVI. In the contiguous zone the law’s not so clear. So they’re trying to cordon the mermaids off with those nets, bring them closer in. So then they can claim the rights to them absolutely. No wiggle room, they figure, if they can just bring them closer in.”
That would have been good information to have earlier. The suit/non-Mormon looked shifty.
“The mermaids don’t belong to you,” said Chip. “They’re not a fish stock. They’re half-human! They don’t belong to anyone!”
“Look, people,” said the
