“Vigo, where’s Jakki?”
“In the wardroom, with the rest of the guys.”
“What are they doing?”
“They’re talking, Emil.”
Tarc made a face.
“Griping, you mean. They’re getting on my nerves.”
“They thought they’d be getting off the ship at Manitoulin Island in Lake Superior. That was five hundred miles ago.”
“So they get off in Chicago instead. What’s the difference?”
“Jakki says Manitoulin Island is in Canada. Chicago is right in the middle of America. It’s a lot easier to avoid a few Nanooks of the North on snowmobiles than the entire United States Homeland Security grid.”
“And how were we going to moor up at the berth with only you and me on board? We steam in without a crew, you think that wouldn’t get the attention of the Master of the Port?”
Vigo had no good reply to that.
Tarc was silent.
“They going to be a problem?” he asked, after some thought.
Majiic didn’t answer right away, partly because he had no intention of goading Emil Tarc into a confrontation with Jakki and his razor-blade companions. Tarc would lose, and, without Tarc, Majiic was pretty sure he’d be over the side and in the water, swimming for his life, about a second later. Tarc should have kept his promise and paid Jakki’s men off at Manitoulin.
“No,” said Majiic, finally. “Jakki has them under control.”
Tarc was staring out at the city skyline, his face as closed as a fist.
“You been watching those choppers?” he said.
Majiic followed Tarc’s gesture, saw the lights of the helicopters, three sharp-nosed black silhouettes low against the lights of the Chicago waterline.
“No. What are they?”
“They’re Apaches. Gunships. Chain gun. Hellfire missiles. I’ve been watching them through the binoculars. They’ve been cruising back and forth along the waterfront, all the way from Navy Pier down to Calumet, and then back again.”
“This is America after nine-eleven,” said Majiic, shrugging it off. Tarc was a paranoid. If the Americans had any idea what the ship was carrying, they’d have sunk her off Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, back at the mouth of the Saint Lawrence.
“We’ve been boarded and inspected three times, Emil. Let’s just cruise into the harbor, moor up in the turning basin, set the soup a-dumping, and go have some dinner somewhere. Job done. We all go home by different routes, like we planned, and Gospic pays us for work well done. Don’t hunt grief.”
“Grief?” said Tarc, his tone sharp. “I’m not hunting grief, Vigo. I’m here to make an impression on America. Why are you here?”
Majiic shrugged.
“Honestly? The money.”
Tarc was about to say something when Jakki opened the wheelhouse door and walked over to Tarc. He was dressed in civilian clothes—jeans, a leather jacket, cowboy boots—but he looked like an artillery shell anyway.
“The guys want me to ask you something.”
Jakki’s attitude was cold but clear. He was not hostile, but he was close to getting there.
“Okay. What is it?”
“They want to know why we have to go inside the port. Why can’t you just cruise along the shore here and open the vents? Lake Michigan flows into the Chicago River, which goes into the Illinois, and the Mississippi. What’s the difference?”
“The difference,” said Tarc, patiently, “is concentration. We want the stuff contained by the walls of the canals. The river current flows west, yes, but it’s slow, and it wanders all over Illinois, mainly at no more than five or six miles an hour. We want the effect to be as strong as it can be.”
Jakki gave the answer some thought.
“I’ll tell them. Another thing. We want to get paid now.”
“You get paid when we’re alongside the berth and moored.”
“That wasn’t the deal. The deal was we got off at Manitoulin. This is not a request, Emil. We want to get paid out now. That’s how it is.”
“Fine,” said Tarc, angry. “Tell them to get their gear—”
“We’re already packed. We want the cash. Now.”
“Okay. It’s in the safe. Tell your people to go to the wardroom, have some coffee. I’ll come down in a few minutes and we’ll share out.”
“You’ll come down in five minutes.”
“Yes. Okay. In five.”
Jakki sent Majiic a look, turned and walked away. For a heavy man wearing cowboy boots, he moved like a cat, soundless and supple. Tarc watched him walk away with an unreadable expression on his face. Once the door had closed, and they could hear Jakki’s boots clanking on the metal stairs as he went back to the crew deck, Tarc picked up the binoculars again and focused them on the three black insectlike shapes that were floating along the waterline, less than two miles away. As he watched, they flared in a tight formation, rose up, reversed direction, and headed back up the shore toward the downtown core.
Tarc took the binoculars away, handed them to Majiic, and said: “Keep an eye on those birds. We’re about four miles out of Calumet. Radio Port Control, and tell them we’re the
Maersk Empire
and we’re coming in for our berth on schedule. We’re not booked to off-load until the morning. See they remember that. I’ll be right back.”
Vigo watched him go, verified the Autohelm, and stepped back out onto the wing deck to clear his mind and settle his nerves. A thousand yards away, inside the pilothouse of a small Coast Guard cutter running with only her navigation lights on, a surveillance technician watched through a tripod-mounted telescope as Majiic stepped to the ship’s rail, took out a cigarette, and lit it. They were shadowing the ship, had been ever since it had come inside the Tactical Perimeter Boundary that Homeland Security had set for all Seawaymax-class tankers bound for the Port of Chicago. This ship, the
Maersk Empire,
had already been boarded three times, according to the Operations computer in the Port Authority office down at Lake Calumet, and its papers had been verified by the International Marine Registry in Marseilles. It was carrying a load of condensed soy milk and was en route to a berth that had been duly booked with the Harbor Master two weeks before.
So, no real urgency with the
Maersk Empire,
but it was a Seawaymax-class boat, and the technician had been present in the Ready Room when a CIA agent, with something of the crocodile about him, had stood up in front of a roomful of Homeland Security guys, FBI agents, Coast Guard sailors, Port Authority cops, and assorted spooks from what the FBI was calling OGOs—Other Governmental Organizations—and when he filled them in on the Seawaymax threat the tech sat up straight and listened hard.
He had the lens, and the guy with the cigarette, so he snapped a shot with the attached digital camera—ran off a string, as the guy took a few quick puffs; he looked nervous, even at a thousand yards— and downloaded the shots to a disk, which he handed to his partner, a serious young blond woman who was the captain of the cruiser. She slipped the disk into her MDT and e-mailed it to the Collections Data clerk at the Port Authority office in Lake Calumet, who uploaded the shots and posted them on the large LCD display in the center of the room, where the movement of every ship in southern Lake Michigan was being monitored in pretty much the same way as airplanes are monitored at O’Hare. The shot, a digitally enhanced telephoto, was tagged:
UNKNOWN SHIP’S OFFICER
Bridge of Maersk Empire
Registry # MDE2665-DWT60-SWMX 2036
Back on the wing bridge of the
Maersk Empire,
Vigo Majiic finished his cigarette and went back into the wheelhouse. He was on the radio to the Harbor Master a few minutes later, giving the clerk their ETA, when Tarc came back on deck. He walked over to the wheel, looked down at the bearing. His face, lit up from below by the greenish glow of the compass screen, had what looked like freckles all over the left side.
“You’ve got something on your face,” said Majiic.
Tarc put a hand up, touched his cheek, looked at his fingertip.
“Oh. Thanks,” he said, taking a cloth from the tool drawer and wiping his face off. Majiic realized that what had looked like freckles had actually been blood spray.
“How did it go with Jakki?” he asked.
Tarc gave him a look.
“How do you think it went?”
Majiic looked out to the lake again, his chest tightening.
“What are you going to do, Emil?”
Tarc walked over to the navigation table, picked up the Google Earth shot, spread it out on the console in front of them.
“This is the harbor mouth here. There’s a tall steel bridge that crosses the canal. That’s not our problem, because it’s a real high bridge and we can go under it at speed. Here’s the problem. It’s eleven hundred meters from the harbor mouth to a swing bridge, where a street called South Ewing crosses the canal. You see it here, the road marked 41. It’s too low to get under, just a lift bridge; comes up in two sections, so we’ll have to have enough headway to crash right through it if we need to. We’re expected, so it should be open, but when they see us coming in so fast—I figure thirty-five knots will do it, but more is better—they may drop the bridge to try and stop us.”
Tarc’s attention was on the photo, so he wasn’t seeing the look on Vigo Majiic’s face. Tarc’s eyes were wide, a kind of heat was coming off him. His voice was high, tight, his breathing short and rapid. Majiic thought about how far it was to the Very flare gun in the signals cupboard. If he could get to that and fire a rocket right into Tarc’s chest . . . ?
“So, you’ll have to have her moving at forty knots when we enter the mouth of the canal, Vigo. As soon as we’re in the canal, I’ll start venting the holding tanks. Then—you see here, where the canal turns to port?—we have to keep up our headway, even as we swing around this bend. No matter what, Vigo, I’ll be counting on you. We have to be at full speed, and you need to take that curve at speed. And you’ll have only another five hundred meters before we hit the second lift bridge right here, where East Ninety-fifth Street crosses over . . . We have to take that out, if they won’t open it, and we have to assume they won’t. There’s a rail bridge up next, but it’s a high bridge, too, so all we have to do is cover the five hundred meters from the Ninety-fifth Street bridge to the Chicago Skyway, where Interstate 90 crosses over the river. Our only problem, then, is to bring the ship to a complete stop under the Skyway—we set her on fire and she blows, the bridge is gone. You’ll have to go full astern as soon as we’ve taken out the bridge. It might be a problem—”
“Why do I have a
problem
at all?” asked Majiic, who was miles ahead of Tarc and busily figuring out how to jump ship at the first opportunity. “Why are you even thinking about this? This is
fucking
nuts!”
“Look, Vigo, for this whole thing to work we have to make an impression. We can’t just steam gently into Calumet Harbor and quietly piss ourselves empty like some
fucking
cockapoo. We need to make some real noise. Otherwise, the Americans will just spin some bullshit story about red tide or algae bloom, and nobody will know we’ve hit them hard.”
“I thought Gospic was taking care of that.”
“Sure. But the U.S. will just say it’s typical terrorist bullshit. How serious is anybody taking that fairy bin Laden these days? No, we need to hit them and be
seen
to hit them. A big event that Gospic can point to. So—”
“You saw those Apaches up the shore? If you do what I think you’re going to do, they’ll come in and light us up like it was New Year’s.”
“Which is an event, then, isn’t it? The boat blows, the cargo gets dumped into the river. Mission accomplished.”
“We’ll
fucking
die!”
Tarc took out his little MP5, laid it on the counter beside the Google shot.
“You
might
die later or you
will
die now, Vigo. I told you all about this back on Maju Island, didn’t I? Achilles? Flame-capped? It was always going to come to this. You want to burn out or fade away, Vigo?”
“I want to get old and die in some pretty girl’s bed.”
“Well, you may yet. Look at it this way. This is America. You live through it, they’ll give you some celebrity lawyer, take ten years to try you, get a hung jury, and you sell the film rights to Columbia Pictures. There are the buoys and that string of lights is the bridge over Calumet Harbor. Now, fire her up and turn her into shore. I’ll be right here beside you”—he lifted the MP5 and pointed it at Majiic’s head—“so let’s make this happen.”
Vigo Majiic stared into the muzzle of the MP5 and only saw a black hole large enough to eat the sun. He spun the wheel around, the huge ship heeled over, white water curled from her port side, the compass swung madly around, the old hull creaking and groaning like the iron gates of an ancient castle. In the hull, sixty thousand metric tons of condensed soy milk shifted in fifteen separate holding tanks. The lights of Calumet Harbor moved from the starboard side to the starboard bow and slowly came into line with the white bow light on its standard, five hundred feet away from the wheelhouse.