He folded his pointing fingers and lifted them to his upper lip, making Dracula fangs.
My laugh turned into a lone hiccup and fled. “Was Rob a monster? Would we both have ended up like Golokhov, slaves to the Stalins and Berias?”
“Listen to Orwell, Grasshopper,” Ben said sententiously.
“What about Orwell?”
“The true and authentic voice of the twentieth century.” Ben drew quote marks in the air. “’If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.’”
“You too, huh?” I said.
“I’m just an aging son of a bitch who’s done questionable things,” Ben said. “I don’t want to live forever, not without Janie. Being with her took away the bad memories. Now, I’ll spend the next few years climbing in and out of a box filled with fewer and fewer bottles of Jim Beam. Or I can die sometime in the next couple of hours. I prefer the latter. History’s a joke, and it was the last passion I had left.”
“I cannot feel that way,” I said, my throat tight. “There’s too much left to see and learn. History does not repeat itself.”
“It can’t,” Ben said. “It stutters too badly. Truth is, history can’t even remember its lines.”
“Goddammit, I’m serious.”
“Was that you cackling a few minutes ago? There’s the true spirit. Smoke a goddamned reefer and sling your rifle. Suck up some ganja fortitude and get ready to meet the Man.” He swung out his arm, wagons ho, and imitated John Wayne. “Laugh in their faces, pilgrim.”
I fell back on my butt beside him, letting my breath out in a whoosh. My thoughts were like a skim of oil blown around a puddle.
Ben took off his cap and ran his hand through his thin gray hair. “Fuck it. It’s all war talk. I hung out with Rob—I swear, Hal, it was not much different from hanging out with you. I watched him work. I admired his brains and how he stood up to going nuts. Christ, he was a brave, crazy bastard, and maybe he was just the type to deserve another fifty or a hundred years, or a thousand, to think things through.”
This left me even more confused.
Ben leaned forward. “Life is for those who still have illusions. Fix up your clinic and watch them beat a path to your door. Maybe I’ll join them. We’re all hypocrites about dying, and old age is scary, too.”
“It’s not for sissies,” I said.
It scares the hell out of me. My father had been as strong as a goddamned tree, an eternal fixture in my little boy mind, profane and often angry, but liable to turn around when he was sober and buy you a bicycle (which Rob and I had fought over) or haul us around on his shoulders.
Dad. Poppa. Mon père. Not a tree, but a vegetable, rotting away from the inside and turning into a blood-soaked clump of God’s potting soil.
“I think after this is over we should compare notes,” Ben said. “I have a hunch we’ve got something all wrong here.”
For a moment I felt defensive and did not know why. Then I put on a reasonable face. “What makes you say that?”
“We’ve been trying not to think about Rudy Banning, haven’t we?”
So true. Too much else to worry about. Screw that enigmatic picture. It was a mistake.
Ben focused on the ship. The helicopters had landed and disembarked their teams. Lemuria slowed. We watched it glide over the sea, coasting for a couple of miles before coming to a dead stop.
The cabin cruiser zagged east a quarter mile or so. A ribbon of smoke rose from a louvered vent on Lemuria, just above the main deck and forward of the second tower. It might have been a kitchen grease fire. Alarms sounded thin and frantic over the choppy water.
“I do not like this,” Ben said with a doggish shake of his head. “We’re going in without coordination at the top and with damn few resources. I don’t think we have any idea what we’re in for. It’s going to be like squeezing a huge zit.”
Our cabin cruiser put on a burst of speed, her twin diesels growling like huge lions. The ship loomed, shining white and jade green, her thousands of ports and windows glinting in the fresh yellow light of the new morning, a steel-and-glass mountain plowing a nervous sea.
“Looks like Purgatory,” Ben said. “Let’s go join the others.”
Breaker got off the radio in the main cabin and told us we were next. “Doesn’t sound like everything’s optimal,” he said, walking past me with a frown. “But we’ve been told to board and move forward to the first tower.”
We climbed out of the cabin and arranged ourselves as if for a group photo shoot, on and below the bridge. Delbarco handed each of us an orange armband and gave the civilians a pistol. We had all been issued a bulletproof vest and holster earlier. “Keep it on safety. Don’t shoot without orders, unless you’re away from your team and in imminent danger.” Breaker grabbed a walkie-talkie from Delbarco and stepped away to talk in a low voice. His frown deepened.
I took little comfort from the gun.
Lemuria’s stern cut off the blue sky above. Inside, between the walls of the split hull, the dock had been lowered like the jaw of a prehistoric fish. The space between the hulls, now a gigantic portable marina, was quiet, an iron mouth waiting patiently to swallow.
Breaker handed the walkie-talkie to Delbarco. Delbarco spoke rapidly behind a cupped hand. The cabin cruiser churned water just aft of a barricade of wide-weave, Day-Glo orange canvas strips, blocking the entrance. Voices shouted in several languages inside the cavern, and were finally dominated by a husky male speaking American with a Texas accent.
Lights burned brightly within the marina, like orange and blue stars in a Cyclops’s cave. Through my binoculars I could make out four yachts winched out of the water on slings. They rocked gently in the westerly breeze blowing between the hulls, waiting for their owners should they wish to escape the humdrum world of the biggest luxury liner on Earth. Excursion launches clung to the inner hulls like larvae in a hive.
A horn sounded and bells rang as the canvas barricade rolled back on a motorized pole. Our boat grumbled out of the daylight and into the banked blue glow of mercury vapor lamps. The marina appeared even bigger from the inside. Two of Lemuria’s emergency rescue Zodiacs, manned by men in wet suits—probably not part of the ship’s crew—helped guide us to a mooring about a hundred feet inside the starboard pier.
Marines in fatigues greeted us on the dock. In French, Spanish, Portuguese, and broken English, a surrounded mob of uncooperative deckhands promised us new orifices for what I loosely translated, using my high-school Spanish, as piracy on the high seas. They were afraid for their jobs, the money they sent their families back in Jamaica, Tobago, Acapulco, Miami, Corpus Christi, Port au Prince.
Breaker grimly pushed us through, our Marine escort acting as a wedge. They were now fully decked out in lightweight armor, combat helmets, and the requisite orange armbands.
“It’s going to get better,” Breaker told us, as we entered a wide glass elevator. “C Team is moving aft to join us. They’re carrying our isolation suits. B Team has gone to the bridge. Lemuria’s captain thinks we’re conducting a Coast Guard drug search. He says he has instructions from the ship’s owners in Florida to cooperate. But he also claims there are about a thousand guests onboard, rich investors and potential buyers.”
Candle caught my eye but said nothing.
“That’s contrary to our intelligence. We’ll have to watch out for them,” Breaker said. “No weapons fire without a direct command.”
