Without warning

‘Mr Peter, sir?’

Lee had snuck up on him again. A Malaccan-Chinese from a 300-year-long line of pirates, Mr Lee was always doing that. Pete tried to rearrange his features into a su

‘Hey, Lee. What’s up, mate?’ Pete tried for a light tone, the sort of thing his fellow Tasmanian Errol Fly

‘Something is up, Mr Peter.’

‘Okay. I’m waiting.’ Jeez, he wished he could loosen up.

‘The Pong Su, she is changing course, sir. She will not meet up with us if she continues on her new heading.’

Pete was dressed in ripped board shorts and a sun-faded sky-blue cotton shirt. The Tropic of Cancer was well north of them and the day would have been uncomfortably warm were it not for a gentle sou’-wester, which only just bellied out the sails but did little to dry the sweat pooling between the breasts of his female crew.

‘Come see. I show,’ said Lee.

Jules finished scraping a plate of grilled fish scraps over the side and used the dish to shade her eyes as she straightened up. ‘Is there something the matter, Pete?’ she called out in her rather posh English accent, the sort of accent his mother would have called ‘all peaches and cream’.

‘Du

‘Righty-o,’ she said. The two girls set about their cleaning chores with added vigour. Both were athletic blondes in their early twenties and resembled each other closely enough that Pete had long ago taken to calling them ‘the Twins’, even though Jules was a Brit, a trust-fund exile from Surrey, while Fifi had run away from a trailer park in Oregon at the age of fifteen. They brought a rare and valuable mix of skills to the Diamantina. Jules had a masters in accounting from the London School of Economics, and her father, the late Lord Balwyn, was a two-time wi

Fifi, the ship’s cook, on the other hand, had not even finished high school and her only inheritance was genetic. Her mom, one of Larry Flynt’s very first Hustler models, had bequeathed her some good looks and a mighty fine arse, but apart from an explosive temper and a morally flexible attitude to life’s manifold challenges, that was about it. And compared to her mom, Fifi was still kind of uptight. She’d left home after her fourth ‘stepdad’, the aptly named Randy, a shiftless, unemployed crab-pot repairman, had suggested they have a threesome and go on Springer to tell their story. He’d heard they could score a trip to Chicago, a free stay in a motel, and two hundred dollars’ cash for expenses. Fifi was on the road, with her thumb in the air, about half an hour later.

She was a great cook, however, and hell on mag wheels with a loaded weapon.

Pete could hear the Twins rummaging through the gun locker just beyond the forward bulkhead as he sat at the nav station and tried to make sense of the screens in front of him. Even with the air-con ru

Now it seemed he had fewer still. Forty minutes ago the Pong Su had deviated sharply off course, and was apparently ru

‘No good, Mr Peter,’ avowed Lee. ‘Look here, and here too.’

It was only then that Pete realised that the Pong Su wasn’t the only ship in trouble. Five other vessels within the Diamantina’s radar bubble had all likewise veered off course and appeared to be heading out of the designated shipping lanes.

‘Pete, you’d better come up on deck. There’s something very strange happening off to the north.’ It was Jules, with Fifi at her elbow. After cleaning up they had changed into their rig for the handover. Both were now dressed in ballistic vests and wearing combat harnesses weighed down with reloads for the Vietnam-era M16s and grenade launchers they would take from the armoury fifteen minutes before the rendezvous. But Pete Holder was begi

‘What do you mean “strange”?’ he asked.

‘I mean odd, weird, right out of the bloody ordinary, Pete. It looks like a storm front came out of that heat haze to the north, but… well… you’ll need to see for yourself.’

Grunting in frustration, he pushed himself up out of the chair and hurried up on deck. Moving forward to the bow, shielding his eyes, he saw immediately what she meant. Far to the north of them, half the sky seemed to be taken up with the queerest, most exotic-looking storm front he’d ever seen. It appeared to sparkle and hang still in the air. It must have been a long way distant, because it appeared from beneath the horizon and climbed away into the stratosphere. Just standing, watching it, he felt insignificant and deeply vulnerable.

‘Radio’s not working!’ Fifi called out from below.

‘Radio’s fine…’ he started to say, then stopped. They’d been monitoring the airwaves for any US or Mexican government traffic, using the yacht’s high-gain ante