The binocular guy nods, reaches up with one hand and presses a lapel switch. The next time he turns around, a word is written across his back in neon green electropigment: MAFIA.
The older guy turns away; his windbreaker says the same thing.
Hiro turns around in the middle of the gangplank. There are twenty crew members in plain sight an around him. Suddenly, their black windbreakers all say, MAFIA. Suddenly, they are all armed.
'I was planning to get in touch with Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong and file a complaint about their proconsul here in Port Sherman,' Hiro jokes. 'He was very uncooperative this morning when I insisted on renting this boat out from under you.'
Hiro is sitting in the first-class dining room of the Kowloon. On the other side of the white linen tablecloth is the man Hiro had previously pegged as the Industry creep on vacation. He's impeccably dressed in a black suit, and he has a glass eye. He has not bothered to introduce himself, as though he's expecting Hiro to know who he is already.
The man does not seem amused by Hiro's story. He seems, rather, nonplussed. 'So?'
'Don't see any reason to file a complaint now,' Hiro says.
'Why not?'
'Well, because now I understand his reluctance not to displace you guys.'
'How come? You got money, don't you?'
'Yeah, but - '
'Oh!' the man with the glass eye says, and allows himself sort of a forced smile. 'Because we're the Mafia, you're saying.'
'Yeah,' Hiro says, feeling his face get hot. Nothing like making a total dickhead out of yourself. Nothing in the world like it, nosireebob.
Outside, the gun battle is just a dim roar. This dining room is insulated from noise, water, wind, and hot flying lead by a double layer of remarkably thick glass, and the space between the panes is full of something cool and gelatinous. The roar does not seem as steady as it used to be.
'Fucking machine guns,' the man says. 'I hate 'em. Maybe one out of a thousand rounds actually hits something worth hitting. And they kill my ears. You want some coffee or something?'
'That'd be great.'
'We got a big buffet coming up soon. Bacon, eggs, fresh fruit you wouldn't believe.'
The guy that Hiro saw earlier, up on the deck, pounding Binocular Man on the back, sticks his head into the room.
'Excuse me, boss, but we're moving into, like, third phase of our plan. Just thought you'd wanna know.'
'Thank you, Livio. Let me know when the Ivans make it to the pier.' The guy sips his coffee, notices Hiro looking confused. 'See, we got a plan, and the plan is divided up into different phases.'
'Yeah, I got that.'
'The first phase was immobilization. Taking out their chopper. Then we had Phase Two, which was making them think we were trying to kill them in the hotel. I think that this phase succeeded wonderfully.'
'Me too.'
'Thank you. Another important part of this phase was getting your ass in here, which is also done.'
'I'm part of this plan?'
The man with the glass eye smiles crisply. 'If you were not part of this plan, you would be dead.'
'So you knew I was coming to Port Sherman?'
'You know that chick Y.T.? The one you have been using to spy on us?'
'Yeah.' No point in denying it.
'Well, we have been using her to spy on you.'
'Why? Why the hell do you care about me?'
'That would be a tangent from our main conversation, which is about all the phases of the plan.'
'Okay. We just finished Phase Two.'
'Now, in Phase Three, which is ongoing, we allow them to think that they are making an incredible, heroic escape, running down the street toward the pier.'
'Phase Four!' shouts Livio, the lieutenant.
'Scusi,' the man with the glass eye says, scooting his chair back, folding his napkin back onto the table. He gets up and walks out of the dining room. Hiro follows him above deck.
A couple of dozen Russians are all trying to force their way through the gate onto the pier. Only a few of them can get through at once, and so they end up strung out over a couple of hundred feet, all running toward the safety of the Kodiak Queen.
But a dozen or so manage to stay together in a clump: a group of soldiers, forming a human shield around a smaller cluster of men in the center.
'Bigwigs,' the man with the glass eye says, shaking his head philosophically.
They all run crablike down the pier, bent down as far as they can go, firing the occasional covering burst of machine-gun fire back into Port Sherman.
The man with the glass eye is squinting against a cool, sudden breeze. He turns to Hiro with a hint of a grin. 'Check this out,' he says, and presses a button on a little black box in his hand.
The explosion is like a single drumbeat, coming from everywhere at once. Hiro can feel it coming up out of the water, shaking his feet. There's no big flame or cloud of smoke, but there is a sort of twin geyser effect that shoots out from underneath the Kodiak Queen, sending jets of white, steamy water upward like unfolding wings. The wings collapse in a sudden downpour, and then the Kodiak Queen seems shockingly low in the water. Low and getting lower.
All the men who are running down the pier suddenly stop in their tracks.
'Now,' Binocular Man mumbles into his lapel.
There are some smaller explosions down on the pier. The entire pier buckles and writhes like a snake in the water. One segment in particular, the segment with the bigwigs on it, is rocking and seesawing violently, smoke rising from both ends. It has been blown loose from the rest of the pier.
All of its occupants fall down in the same direction as it jerks sideways and begins to move, yanked out of its place. Hiro can see the tow cable rising up out of the water as it is stretched tight, running a couple of hundred feet to a small open boat with a big motor on it, which is now pulling out of the harbor.
There's still a dozen bodyguards on the segment. One of them sizes up the situation, aims his AK-47 across the water at the boat that's towing them, and loses his brains. There's a sniper on the top deck of the Kowloon.
All the other bodyguards throw their guns into the water.
'Time for Phase Five,' the man with the glass eye says. 'A big fucking breakfast.'
By the time he and Hiro have sat back down in the dining room, the Kowloon has pulled away from the pier and is headed down the fjord, following a course parallel to the smaller boat that is towing the segment. As they eat, they can look out the window, across a few hundred yards of open water, and see the segment keeping pace with them. All the bigwigs and the bodyguards are on their asses now, keeping their centers of gravity low as the segment bucks nastily.
'When we get farther away from land, the waves get bigger,' the man with the glass eye says. 'I hate that shit. All I want is to hang on to the breakfast long enough to tamp it down with some lunch.'
'Amen,' says Livio, heaping some scrambled eggs onto his plate.
'Are you going to pick those guys up?' Hiro says. 'Or just let them stay out there for a while?'
'Fuck 'em. Let 'em freeze their asses off. Then when we bring them onto this boat, they'll be ready for it. Won't put up too much of a fight. Hey, maybe they'll even talk to us.'
Everyone seems pretty hungry. For a while, they just dig into breakfast. After a while, the man with the glass eye breaks the ice by announcing how great the food is, and everyone agrees. Hiro figures it's okay to talk now.
'I was wondering why you guys were interested in me.' Hiro figures that this is always a good thing to know in the case of the Mafia.
'We're all in the same happy gang,' the man with the glass eye says.
