Chapter 42

With what measure you measure, it shall be measured to you.

—Jesus

 

Harry wouldn’t have recognized his father if Rico hadn’t been with Colonel Scholz. The two colonels sat in the cockpit of the Kamui, looking like casual holiday boaters drinking their frosty lemonade, the whole city ablaze like a violent sunrise behind them. Both Scholz and Harry’s father wore fire-blackened field pants and black T-shirts. Scholz’s face was hollow-eyed, pale, and for the first time Harry thought she looked old. His father looked dead. Kamui’s clockwork diesel chugged in the waveslap, and rigging rattled over the pop-pop of small-arms fire.

Rena Scholz held her lemonade in one hand and a scorched palm-cam in the other.

“Hey, Harry,” Rico rasped. “Good work, son. You too, Sonja.”

Rico didn’t attempt to rise to greet them, and Harry suspected that he couldn’t.

“Thanks, Dad. So far, so good.”

Sonja stood dripping on the pier in silence while she watched the city burn.

Rico’s eyelids drooped, his hands trembled, but his mouth worked up a smile.

“Between us, Pan-Pacific’s had a mighty bad day,” Rico said. “Cast off the bow line and jump aboard. You remember how to sail this thing?”

Harry grunted, moved to the bow cleat and untied the line. He didn’t ask about the fishing boat rafted to the rail of the Kamui. His father was only this casual when he had a trap ready to spring, and Harry expected that this time it was Hodge’s neck that was on the line. He and Sonja had sailed aboard Kamui twice. Both times his father had secured the boat from the DEA so that he and Sonja’s dad could take their families out. Both times Rico had failed to show up because he was drunk somewhere or chasing some skirt. But Harry, Sonja and Red Bartlett had enjoyed a few days sailing up- and down-coast.

“Come on, Sonja,” Rena Scholz said. “Let me give you a hand up.”

Sonja clasped the offered hand and climbed aboard, her wet tennis shoes slopping the deck.

A formation of Costa Brava’s tank-killers screamed overhead, hugging the coastline south. Rico pointed them out for Hodge’s benefit.

“Those boys have had enough,” Rico said. “They’re saving their own asses, heading for Costa Rica or Panama. If they’d left a few minutes earlier, the Peace and Freedom boys might still have their chopper. What’s the latest, Major?”

Hodge said nothing. He glanced around fearfully at the confusion of small boats that careened off each other and the pier in their frantic dash for the open water and safety. Overloaded barques pedaled a beeline for the channel.

Hodge avoided Rico’s gaze and shifted from foot to foot on the wet pier. Harry saw Hodge eye the water, as though weighing the sure death by water against anything his dad might have to offer.

Harry coiled the bow line and tossed the loop to Rena Scholz. A burst of rifle fire ended in a grenade explosion at the head of the boardwalk. Two Harbor Patrol boats, loaded way beyond capacity with women, kids, luggage and chickens, screamed past their bow and snaked their way through slower traffic to the mouth of the harbor. None of those things distracted Harry from standing between Hodge and escape. Harry followed a silent, sullen Hodge over the rail.

The sailboat’s diesel was smooth and nearly silent, but the rest of the world was noise. Several fireballs and concussions marked the destruction of the marina’s fences behind them. Rico motioned Sonja to the topside controls.

“Scholz has the charts,” Rico said. “Make for Maude Island when we clear the harbor. We’ve punched it into the navcom. Harry and I have some business with Major Hodge, here. Major? You don’t seem very grateful that we just saved your slimy ass.”

Major Hodge’s gaze was fixed on two metal boxes that Rico held in his lap. Harry would bet big money that the metal boxes covered a pistol, too, the way his dad’s hand lazed at the edge of them.

“I’m grateful,” Hodge said, and tried a smile. He spread his hands slowly, water dripping from his clothing to the deck. “I’m very grateful. I’m just not quite sure how . . .”

“Yes,” Rico said, “‘how?’ is the great question of the hour, isn’t it? Right after ‘what?’” He tapped the top metal box with his index finger. “This, for example. What is it?”

Hodge glanced quickly towards Scholz, as though asking for help. She stood, impassive, behind Sonja at the wheel, fending off the fishing boat as they maneuvered away from the pier. Sonja held her head high, to see over the top of the cabin, and picked their way through the chaos of small-boat traffic. She pretended that she wasn’t interested in Rico’s game with Hodge, but Harry could tell that she was tuned in.

“It’s insulin,” Hodge said. He began to shiver as the wind from the fires whipped the wavetops and his wet clothes. “I’m a diabetic, and I need insulin.”

Rico spoke in that calm, level voice that Harry knew always preceded a major explosion.

“If we had more time, I’d dick around with you,” Rico said. “But our circle of friends is narrowing fast, and you’re insulting my intelligence. The least you could do is honor me with a good lie, one I might be proud to remember you by.”

Rico held the top box over the rail, and asked again.

“What is it?”

“Allergy shots,” Hodge said, speaking quickly. “They’re in a series and I have to take one…”

When the metal tin hit the water, Harry heard a groan from Hodge’s throat that was ripped from the very bottom of his being. For a moment Harry thought Hodge would jump in after the box, but then the man remembered that he couldn’t swim.

“Oh, no. Oh, no,” was all Hodge could bring himself to say.

He grabbed a boathook and ran along the rail, trying to snag the silver box that now shone blue-green under the harbor surface. The blunt prong of his boathook just forced it under the surface that much faster. Then it was hit by a speedboat and sunk. Hodge dropped the boathook onto the deck, then turned a stricken face towards the others, hands outstretched as if expecting them to help him.

Rico picked up the remaining tin and held it over the rail, and Hodge dropped to his knees at Rico’s feet, unmindful of the pistol in Rico’s other hand.

“Please, no!” he begged. Hodge turned a desperate glance towards Scholz, who ignored him. “Please,” he repeated, nodding towards Scholz, “don’t drop it. She’ll die. You don’t want her to die.”

“No,” Rico said, “I don’t want her to die. Does Scholz have diabetes? Allergies that she’s not aware of?”

“You know what it is or you wouldn’t be doing this to me,” Hodge said. “Believe me, I was trying to save the children.”

“A lot of interest in these kids, these days,” Rico said. He kept his hand with the box over the rail. “Tell me about your newfound parental instincts. Tell me about your work with ViraVax.”

“Mishwe owed me some favors,” Hodge said. “He gave me two series of antidotes—one for me, one for . . . her.”

Rena Scholz raised an eyebrow.

“How thoughtful of him,” Scholz said. “And he didn’t even know me.”

Hodge turned to her in desperation.

“I got it for you. I talked him out of it. I didn’t want you to . . .”

“To die like the rest of the world?” Rico interrupted. “How romantic, Hodge. You and Colonel Scholz, the new Adam and Eve of the Apocalypse. I’m touched. But why save the kids if they’re just going to die later?”

“The GenoVax won’t kill them,” Hodge said. “They’re immune. They’re the real Adam and Eve.”

Harry was stunned, hearing this from someone who wasn’t merely speculating.

“So,” Harry said, “Marte was right. She guessed as much when she went through the cloning data that Sonja’s dad siphoned out of Mishwe’s records.” He clenched his fists and stood chest to chest with Hodge. “What else did you do to us?”

“That’s all I know,” Hodge said. His full, pale lips trembled.

Rico brought the case back into the boat and opened it. He selected one of the slapshots and squirted half of it overboard.

“No, no, no,” Hodge cried. “Don’t do that.”

“The boy asked you a question, Major. If you answer it, I’ll let you have one of these.”

“There’s a fail-safe,” Hodge said. “That’s all I know about.”

Rico set the injector back into the case.

“That’s better. What kind of fail-safe?”

“To make sure that they remain pure. He didn’t want their genetic material wasted.”

Harry felt himself dizzying with an unfamiliar but comfortable fury.

“What does that mean?”

Hodge stared at the puddle of water on the deck at his feet. He wouldn’t look up.

“It means you can’t have sex with anyone but each other,” he said. ‘If you do, they’ll die.”

Harry screamed his rage, and his palms popped both of Hodge’s ears.

“Marte!” he sobbed, then snap-kicked Hodge under the sternum. “Marte!”

Harry grabbed Hodge by both ears, then kneed Hodge’s face and kicked his belly as he dropped to the deck.

“You bastard! You rotten sonofabitch!”

“Wait, Harry,” Scholz said, with a hand on his arm. She moved quickly between them. “He’ll get his punishment soon enough. He’ll die like the rest of us.” She glanced up at Rico and their gazes held for a moment, two. “Don’t become what you hate, Harry, or it’s all completely hopeless.”

The sailboat lurched then as the fishing boat shoved itself into gear. Hull scraped hull as shouts came from below-decks, and a beautiful, terrified redhead reached up with a machete to chop their towline free. Sonja slipped the transmission into neutral as the St. Elias bounced back into their stern. It hung up in their rudder for a few seconds and spun them sideways, then pushed free.

The St. Elias wallowed away from them, already listing, and Harry saw thick black smoke and flashes of blue flame through the portholes. A small ski boat hit the St. Elias a glancing blow at the bow and the boat listed all the way over to its rail. Steam screamed from a jagged hole in the hull; then it started under in a boil of froth and foam. Father Free popped to the surface, holding a plastic bag out of the water.

“Spook!”

Rico tried to stand, and Hodge made a grab for his precious box. A runabout collided with Kamui’s bow and capsized a rowboat full of children. Hodge missed the grab and his case clattered to the deck, but Hodge’s momentum carried him into Rico. The lurch of the collision tipped both men over the rail in a slow-motion ballet.

Harry was in the water before he knew it. Dozens of small boats swarmed overhead, blocking what little light penetrated the turbulent bay. Harry swam downward, kicking himself into a spiral as he groped around wildly for his father. He felt something solid hit his back. Harry reached around and made a blind grab, hoping for the best. He got his dad’s hand with the pistol still in it.

Harry moved to get behind his dad’s limp body, and that was when Hodge clutched him around the legs. Harry tried kicking free, but Hodge had him tight with both arms, dragging them down. Rico never moved, and his body was hot, too hot, with bubbles leaking out of his scalp, his shirt, his melted, empty eyes.

Harry yanked the pistol free and his father’s finger stuck in the trigger guard. He pushed his father’s corpse and its bloody froth away and felt the telltale mushiness of collapsing tissues against his palms.

Air leaked past Harry’s lips as his lungs burned and Hodge dragged him further into the depths. He freed the trigger guard of his father’s finger, pressed the Hornet against one of Hodge’s arms, and fired. A dull pat and a burst of blood-stained bubbles rose past Harry, but Hodge held tight with his other hand. As the last of his breath whooshed out of him, Harry pressed the pistol to Hodge’s head and fired again. He kicked and stroked upward, chasing his own leaking air. Harry hadn’t broken the surface yet when he felt something snag the back of his shirt and yank him out of the filthy water.

Harry coughed and gagged as Rena Scholz hauled him alongside with the boathook. She dragged him by his belt over the rail, where he lay gasping beside a wet, gasping priest. Scholz hurried to the stern and began probing again with the hook.

“It’s no use,” Harry gasped. “Dad’s dead.”

“Dead?”

Sonja didn’t hesitate. She slammed the Kamui into forward and jumped on the throttle without a word. She shoved her way through the small boats that jammed the narrow channel out of the harbor, her face set in a mask of anger and despair. Behind them, automatic weapons splintered a wallowing houseboat and stitched across their wake.

Scholz thrust a few more times off the stern with the hook, but her movements were slow, automatic, numb. She looked like a B-movie zombie, barely holding her balance. The ride was choppy with all the small boats around them, and Harry was afraid Scholz was going over the side. He crawled to the back of the cockpit and grabbed her arm.

“He’s dead, Scholz,” he said. “The Deathbug got him. And Hodge won’t be coming up, either.”

Scholz dropped the hook, and Harry caught it before it hit the water. He set it down on the deck and Scholz dropped heavily beside it. She stared back at the inferno that used to be La Libertad and said nothing. Harry picked up the metal case and handed it to her.

“Maybe this is what he said it is,” he said.

She shook her head.

“Do you really believe that Mishwe would want to save a snake like Hodge?” she said. “It’s probably just saline.”

“You could take a little,” he suggested. “Then we could get it analyzed, just in case.”

“Yeah,” Scholz said, her voice as hollow as her eyes, “we could do that.”

Harry thought that she hadn’t really heard him, and wouldn’t really hear him for a while yet.

“What got Hodge?” Sonja asked.

They were just breaking out of the harbor and rounding the red channel marker, heading for the open sea. The Harbor Patrol was long gone, and a stream of small boats whined their way towards open ocean.

Harry tossed the little Hornet onto a cushion beside Sonja and ignored Father Free, who clutched a plastic bag to his chest and appeared to be praying to himself.

“I did,” Harry said. “I’m going to put together Marte’s data for transmission. Can I get you something from the galley?”

“Coffee,” Sonja said, not looking at him. She concentrated on staying away from the pack of boats fanning out from the harbor. “It’s going to be a long night.”