Blood Ocean (31 page)

He looked at the zeppelin.

The bullet took him through the chest and knocked him back against the gun.

He took another drag on his joint, made a gun with the finger and thumb of his left hand and shot the zeppelin out of the sky.

F
IRECRACKERS WERE GOING
off!

Hooray! He loved firecrackers!

Mr. Nakihama ran to the window, unlatched it and stuck his head outside. He heard them, but he couldn’t see them. Where were they?

Suddenly his vision was filled with what he’d expected—explosions of pink and blue and yellow, showering the Floating City with flowers.

He clapped his hands with glee.

How marvelous that Ishihama International would bring a celebration to this terrible place.

He reached his hand out and brushed one of the explosions. They were so close. If he could only reach farther...

He removed his head from the window and ran into the next room, where he was able to open the door to his deck. He hurried outside and leaped onto the railing, balancing precariously as he cheered the celebration. It was going to be a new day. Perhaps this was the day they were going to return to Tokyo. Perhaps this was their final day amidst the ghetto of the sea peoples.

A brilliant chartreuse pagoda blossomed in the air. He screamed in jubilation as he leaped out and grabbed it. He’d never felt so warm and so good. He loved this pagoda. It was his pagoda and he’d live in it for all time.

G
RISHA WATCHED THROUGH
the scope of his Dragunov SVD sniper rifle as the Jap leaped to his death, falling atop the mast of a nearby ship. With all that water in the lagoon, it was a mystery how he’d missed it. An even greater mystery was that this was the twentieth person he’d seen jump from the ship.

Grisha chuckled.

There must be one hell of a party going on in there. He remembered once when he was drinking in Greece, he’d had so much Ouzo he’d woken in a car five kilometers away from their barracks. There had been two dead chickens in the backseat. When he’d finally returned and told Anatoli, the damned Cossack wouldn’t let him live it down. People got to calling him
Kooritsa
Grisha, “Chicken Grisha.” Grisha guessed he’d gotten hungry from the booze and needed some food. The car lighter had been in his hand when he’d awoken; maybe he’d tried to cook the chickens with that. Regardless, it was a tale of what happened when too much alcohol got into you.

He had to stop watching the ship, however. His job was the commandos. The Draganov had a maximum effective range of 1300 meters—the distance of thirteen football pitches—at which he could knock the center out of a coin with a 7.62 mm round. The commandos were fanned out across the barge surface only 700 meters away. They’d never know what hit them. It would be like the finger of God had come down and tapped them in the head. Not God, though, but rather
Kooritsa
Grisha.

He swung his aiming point around, then counted and prioritized his targets. He let his finger rest against the smooth steel of the trigger and waited.

T
HE SMALL ARMS
fire was becoming a pain in the ass. Worse, the zeppelin had taken a hit. Even as Jacques watched, it lurched and rolled on its axis. Now full, with three years worth of serum from the vats on the ship, it was the only way for them to return to his headquarters in Las Vegas. The loss of the air machine would become a great problem.

When the firing had started, his men had immediately responded, hitting the decks and rolling into combat firing positions. They’d aimed alternately high and low, each assigned an angle and direction, but held their fire until a target presented itself.

Jacques had knelt as well, searching for the source of the firing. It was small arms fire and didn’t present much of a problem to their body armor, but they needed to make sure whomever was firing wasn’t able to get a lucky headshot.

Pot-shotting.

He’d had the same problem in Denver and in Phoenix. Uppity locals with no sense of their position in the hierarchy, falsely believing that they could attack The Rediscovered Dawn, lawful inheritors of the planet. He’d disabused them of the notion on both occasions, penalizing them by exterminating entire families. It was important that people knew their place in life.

Like the denizens of this ghetto of a floating city. Did they really think that this was their only option? Did they really not know that California lay less than a hundred miles to the east, and offered a much better lifestyle?

As much as he hated the Japanese
troudocs
, Jacque had to give them props. They’d introduced an hegemony in this backwater, making of their ship a nautical Mount Olympus... considering, of course, that the potential for worship was just now blooming in the minds of the subservient populace. Given enough time for two to three generations to pass, the Japanese would become mythological characters in stories and be worshipped by those struggling to survive aboard the surrounding ships.

He’d seen it in Needles, California, where the inhabitants worshipped
The Man Who Walked Between the Rocks
.

He’d seen it in Carefree, Arizona, where the residents of a nursing home were treated as gods—food, gifts and virgins lavished upon them for their goodwill.

He’d seen it in Bombay Beach along the Godforsaken Salton Sea where, much like this place, a family had lived in a houseboat in the middle of the water and were treated like royalty.

He never underestimated a population’s requirement to be ruled. He never underestimated their desire to attribute earthly events to the sublime. The more remote and the more removed the people were, the greater their ability to allow themselves to become subjugated by a belief or an ideal.

Yes, the Japs deserved props for what they’d done, especially for establishing a string of serum factories along the coast. Although the treaty with The Rediscovered Dawn wasn’t worth the paper it was written on, they honored it because the Japanese, and Ishihama International in particular, had a product that was in dire need.

A round rang off the deck a few meters from him.

He switched his frequency to the zeppelin. “Find the source of that fire and remove it,” he commanded.
Pot-shotters. Merde!

He had a dozen commandos in the zeppelin. They’d been there to supervise the transfer of serum and guard it, but had found themselves further engaged protecting it from assault from the city. They’d taken out the man who’d fired the harpoon and were tracking the pot-shotters where they could. Intelligence from the ship indicated that the only armed assembly, other than the Russians, were a missmatched group calling themselves
Los Tiburones
—The Sharks. Interesting that drug runners should work together and form a collective. If he had more time, Jacques would have loved to study them.

Where once he’d been an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Montreal, now he was a commander of The Rediscovered Dawn.

Where once he’d been studying the effects of external stimuli on a culture or a society, now he was doing everything he could to exploit and kill them.

Ah, how times had changed.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

T
HE MOON HAD
been eaten by the sky, hiding their figures. Thanks be to Mother Kapo.

The wind whistled through the rigging, hiding their noise. Thanks be to Pele.

He whispered prayers to Great Ku, God of War. The word itself meant
to stand
up
, which was what they were doing. These commandos had been brought in to support the Real People, all of whom strived to push them down. Ku appeared in many forms. Sometimes he was an old man weary from war. Sometimes he was a young man, eager for battle. But tonight he was Ku-ka-ili-moku. He was the Seizer of Land and the Protector of King Kamehameha. Ku demanded sacrifices. He demanded blood. And tonight he would get all these things.

Kavika had climbed the highest of all of them. With his oiled skin against the blackness of the night and the darkness of the crane, he was virtually invisible. He moved incrementally, squinting so to hide the sheen from his eyes.

He could feel Bane, Kai and Mikana behind him. Behind them climbed two more.

They were carrying
Hoe Leiomano
swords scabbarded across their backs. The blades were two-foot lengths of deadly-sharp steel, and the rubber basket hilts were encrusted with shark teeth, dipped in Takifugu venom, harvested by the Water Dogs. The Takifugu had enough poison to kill thirty men if need be.

Oceanside, thirty Pali Boys climbed the hulls of the inverted ships, armed with bungees and blowguns. Their slender steel darts had flights made from seagull tail feathers and carried Lion Fish spines. The venom of the Lion Fish wasn’t like that of the Takifugu: it didn’t kill except in massive amounts, but it was the very essence of pain.

He’d reached the spot where he’d be forced to climb along the thin arm of the crane. Looking down, he saw the tops of the heads of the commandos. Ku could have reached out and squeezed their heads. He tried that, but nothing happened.

Two more harpoons struck the zeppelin. Gunfire erupted from the commandos, bullets smashing into the harpoon boats. Splinters of woods danced in the ship lights, but not before the cable reels could be tossed overboard. Just in time too, as the occupants of the zeppelin managed to dislodge the first harpoon. The Water Dogs needed to hurry.

Kavika closed his eyes and shimmied outwards, prayers to Ku and Pele mixing into an improvised mantra. He opened his eyes again halfway along; he’d passed several of his Pali Boys and was nearing where they’d hung Kaja. He reached it and let his body drift off the arm of the crane; when his feet felt the chain, he lowered himself ever-so-slowly so that his movement wouldn’t cause a rattle.

He had two bungee cords wrapped around him. He unwrapped one end of one and attached it to the crossbar, tugging on the clip to make sure it was in place, and then tied the other end under Kaja’s arms. He unwrapped the other bungee cord and attached it to the crossbar as well, but this one he left attached to his waist.

Once that was done, he paused to check the others. Everyone had made it to their assigned man. It was almost time to use the flare. All that was left was to wait until the rest of the Pali Boys were in place.

“Kavika,” came a tired, pain-filled voice.

“Easy now,” he whispered. “We’ll get you down in a moment.”

“Don’t get them killed,” Kaja said.

“If we die, we die,” he whispered. “Remember, Kaja—live large. Now keep it down, or the commandos’ll hear us gabbing.”

Kavika settled in for a wait, but it turned out he didn’t have long. Within minutes he saw the first light flash from the left ship, then a second flash from the right.

It was time.

Just as he was pulling the flare from the knife sheath on his calf, Chito sunk the slaver ship. The grind and squeal of the old barge slipping from its moorings was impossibly loud. It startled him, and he lost his grip on the flare and watched as it fell.

It struck the back of the commando beneath him, who immediately looked up. The man was about to shout something when his attention was caught by the events transpiring on the zeppelin.

Two cables attaching the slaver ship to the Zeppelin snapped taut. The commandos aboard the zeppelin opened fire with all they had, but there was nothing they could do, no matter how many rounds found the ship. Chito, brother of Leilani, was bringing them down.

Two more harpoons fired. One missed its target but wrapped around the tail of the zeppelin, and the other hit it amidships, right where the commandos had been firing. The cables were attached to the ships belonging to the People of the Sun.

The Water Dogs had opened holes in their hulls that were too wide to repair, and the sea was pulling all three ships underwater.

And with them came the zeppelin, drawn inexorably down. Commandos leaped out as it fell, small black specks plummeting to the sea and to the decks of nearby ships. The airship crashed into an old whaler beneath it, the one from which Sanchez Kelly had struck the first blow. The fiberglass vessel splintered and coughed gouts of flame that ate at the canopy of the airship, igniting the hydrogen spilling free from the harpoon-made holes. As it struck the ocean, the zeppelin exploded, sending flames and shards of metal flying in all directions.

A round sizzled by Kavika. He’d temporarily forgotten about the man he’d hit with the flare.

His attention snapped back to the man below him, who was steadying his aim as he prepared to fire another round. Then the commando’s head exploded.

Yes—Grisha had come through!

Kavika reached over to the manacles. Just as Sasha had promised, they were designed to be locked, but had just been closed. He glanced at his compatriots. They were ready.

He drew the
Hoe Leiomano
and held it in his right hand; the bungee cord attached to his waist was held loosely in his other hand. With a warrior cry, he pushed himself out and away from Kaja. He had to time it right. The bungee strained to stop him, and at his lowest point, he was still a few feet from the deck. Just as he started to rise, he used the blade of the
Hoe Leiomano
to cut the bungee cord.

Now he was among the commandos.

They were already being shot at by Grisha and his Draganov. Most of their fire was concentrated toward the Russian, although the conning tower of the submarine was really too far away for their rifles.

Los Tiburones
had also moved closer. Led by an old friend of Lopez-Larou’s, one of her father’s old Campesinos named George Ibarra, they were firing from behind metal ship rails. The shots were mostly blind, but they were enough to keep the commandos off balance and a nuisance they couldn’t completely ignore. Even though they wore armor, a lucky shot to the head would end them.

On the deck he rolled to his left and brought the
Hoe Leiomano
to bear against the closest commando. The blade slipped harmlessly off the armor of the man’s chest, but Kavika followed up with a smash of the shark teeth to his unprotected face. The man’s eyes shot wide as the detrodotoxin tore into his bloodstream.