motor on it.'
Because of the fires and small explosions going off on Bruce Lee's pirate ship, it takes them a minute to realize that several people are still alive there, still shooting at them. When Fisheye becomes aware of this, he pulls the trigger again, the barrels whirl themselves up into a transparent cylinder, and the tearing, hissing noise begins again. As he waves the gun back and forth, hosing the target down with a hypersonic shower of depleted uranium, Bruce Lee's entire ship seems to sparkle and glitter, as though Tinkerbell was flying back and forth from stem to stern, sprinkling nuclear fairy dust over it.
Bruce Lee's smaller yacht makes the mistake of coming around to see what's going on. Fisheye turns toward it for a moment and its high, protruding bridge slides off into the water.
Major structural elements of the trawler are losing their integrity. Enormous popping and wrenching noises are coming from inside as big pieces of Swiss-cheesed metal give way, and the superstructure is slowly collapsing down into the hull like a botched souffle. When Fisheye notes this, he ceases fire.
'Cut it out, boss,' Vic says.
'I'm melting!' Fisheye crows.
'We could have used that trawler, asshole,' Eliot says, vindictively yanking his pants back on.
'I didn't mean to blow it all up. I guess the little bullets just go through everything.'
'Sharp thinking, Fisheye,' Hiro says.
'Well, I'm sorry I took a little action to save our asses. Come on, let's go get one of them little boats before they all burn.'
They paddle in the direction of the decapitated yacht. By the time they reach it, Bruce Lee's trawler is just a listing, empty steel hull with flames and smoke pouring out of it, spiced by the occasional explosion.
The remaining portion of the yacht has many, many tiny little holes in it, and glitters with exploded fragments of fiberglass: a million tiny little glass fibers about a millimeter long. The skipper and a crew member, or rather the stew that they turned into when the bridge was hit by Reason, slid off into the water along with the rest of the debris, leaving behind no evidence of their having been there except for a pair of long parallel streaks trailing off into the water. But there is a Filipino boy down in the galley, the galley so low, unhurt and only dimly aware of what happened.
A number of electrical cables have been sawn in half. Eliot digs up a toolbox from belowdecks and spends the next twelve hours patching things together to the point where the engine can be started and the yacht can be steered. Hiro, who has a rudimentary knowledge of electrical stuff, acts as gofer and limp-dicked adviser.
'Did you hear the way the pirates were talking, before Fisheye opened up on them?' Hiro asks Eliot while they are working.
'You mean in pidgin?'
'No. At the very end. The babbling.'
'Yeah. That's a Raft thing.'
'It is?'
'Yeah. One guy will start in and the rest will follow. I think it's just a fad.'
'But it's common on the Raft?'
'Yeah. They all speak different languages, you know, all those different ethnic groups. It's like the fucking Tower of Babel. I think when they make that sound - when they babble at each other - they're just imitating what all the other groups sound like.'
The Filipino kid starts making them some food. Vic and Fisheye sit down in the main cabin belowdecks, eating, going through Chinese magazines, looking at pictures of Asian chicks, and occasionally looking at nautical charts. When Eliot gets the electrical system back up and running, Hiro plugs his personal computer in, to recharge its batteries.
By the time the yacht is up and running again, it's dark. To the southwest, a fluctuating column of light is playing back and forth against the low overhanging cloud layer.
'Is that the Raft over there?' Fisheye says, pointing to the light, as all hands converge on Eliot's makeshift control center.
'It is,' Eliot says. 'They light it up at night so that the fishing boats can find their way back to it.'
'How far away do you think it is?' Fisheye says.
Eliot shrugs. 'Twenty miles.'
'And how far to land?'
'I have no idea. Bruce Lee's skipper probably knew, but he's been pureed along with everyone else.'
'You're right,' Fisheye says. 'I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.''
'The Raft usually stays at least a hundred miles offshore,' Hiro says, 'to reduce the danger of snags.'
'How we doing on gas?'
'I dipped the tank,' Eliot says, 'and it looks like we're not doing so well, to tell you the truth.'
'What does that mean, not doing so well?'
'It's not always easy to read the level when you're out to sea,' Eliot says. 'And I don't know how efficient these engines are. But if we're really eighty or a hundred miles offshore, we might not make it.'
'So we go to the Raft,' Fisheye says. 'We go to the Raft and persuade someone it's in his best interests to give us some fuel. Then, back to the mainland.'
No one really believes it's going to happen this way, least of all Fisheye. 'And,' he continues, 'while we're there - on the Raft - after we get the fuel and before we go home - some other stuff might happen, too, you know. Life's unpredictable.'
'If you have something in mind, why don't you just spit it out?' Hiro says.
'Okay. Policy decision. The hostage tactic failed. So we go for an extraction.'
'Extraction of what?'
'Of Y.T.'
'I go along with that,' Hiro says, 'but I have another person I want to extract also, as long as we're extracting.'
'Who?'
'Juanita. Come on, you said yourself she was a nice girl.'
'If she's on the Raft, maybe she's not so nice,' Fisheye says.
'I want to extract her anyway. We're all in this together, right? We're all part of Lagos's gang.'
'Bruce Lee has some people there,' Eliot says.
'Correction. Had.'
'But what I'm saying is, they're going to be pissed.'
''You think they're going to be pissed. I think they're going to be scared shitless,' Fisheye says. 'Now drive the boat, Eliot. Come on, I'm sick of all this fucking water.'
50
Raven ushers Y.T. onto a flat-assed boat with a canopy on top. It is some kind of a riverboat that has been turned into a Vietnamese/Arnerican/Thai/Chinese business establishment, kind of a bar/restaurant/whorehouse/gambling den. It has a few big rooms, where lots of people are letting it all hang out, and a lot of little tiny steel-walled rooms down below where God knows what kind of activity is taking place.
The main room is packed with lowlife revelry. The smoke ties her bronchial passages into granny knots. The place is equipped with a shattering Third World sound system: pure distortion echoing off painted steel walls at three hundred decibels. A television set bolted onto one wall is showing foreign cartoons, done up in a two-color scheme of faded magenta and lime green, in which a ghoulish wolf, kind of like Wile E. Coyote with rabies, gets repeatedly executed in ways more violent than even Warner Bros. could think up. It's a snuff cartoon. The soundtrack is either turned off completely or else overwhelmed by the screeching melody coming out of the speakers. A bunch of erotic dancers are performing at one end of the room.
It's impossibly crowded, they'll never get a place to sit. But shortly after Raven comes into the room, half a dozen guys in the comer suddenly stand bolt upright and scatter from a table, snatching up their cigarettes and
