Authors: Neal Stephenson
One warning. I was guessing we could each take out a rope during the one warning. We headed for the stern. There were two ropes attached to bitts back there.
Ever chop wood? Sometimes if you flail away in a panic, you don't get anywhere, but two or three solid chops will do the job. I used both techniques on the spring line, and I didn't chop it through, but I reduced it to a few shreds of yarn that could be relied on to break. Bone severed the stern line in about four strokes.
The guys with the guns had a basic problem here. The deck was a few feet higher than the pier. If we stayed on our bellies, they couldn't see us. So we spent the rest of the gig on our stomachs.
Boone had less stomach than I did, and he knew how to do this GI crawl, so he traveled about twice as fast as me. He ripped off the oxygen mask and splashed it.
By the time I made it to the other end, pushing Laughlin's briefcase in front of me, Boone was way out on the prow, feeding a rope down through one of the hawse-holes, the tunnels that the anchor chains passed through. Bart was down below us on the Zodiac, waiting. He was going to take it out to
Extra Stout
, now about fifty feet away; they'd attach it to a hawser, and we'd haul that up here and attach it to the
Basco Explorer
. I was several yards behind Boone, my Swiss Army knife deployed, sawing through the bow lines strand by strand.
I was lying on the deck with my head sideways, and I noticed that I could see a Basco water tower a thousand feet away. And I could see some guys climbing up there. Guys with guns. Three of them.
Something whizzed over our heads and we heard a distant crack-crack-crack.
“M-16s,” Boone said, “or AR-15s, actually.”
I slid the briefcase over to him. “I'm done with my part,” he explained, and kicked it back to me.
Sawdust flew and a narrow trench appeared in the deck about four feet away from me. At this range, the rounds from the rifles had picked up a vicious tumbling action that would cause them to chew around inside your body like some kind of parasite from outer space.
My air tank exploded and I felt myself being stabbed in the back. There was continuing noise; I was hollering but that wasn't just me. It was the
Extra Stout's
boathorn, giving us the signal to pull. Boone was going to need help so I got the briefcase in between my face and the water tower and crawled forward, toward the hawse-hole.
I found the rope and started pulling on it. Boone didn't seem to be helping any. There was a lot of slack and then it started pulling back.
Joe Gallagher had told me to look for the towing bittsâsturdy posts sticking out of the deck. If I looped the hawser onto anything else, the
Extra Stout would
just rip it loose. I found the bitts and rolled their way, trying to keep that briefcase with me, hauling on that rope. If I kept hauling, I'd find Gallagher's hawser. A Kevlar towing line. Kevlarâa wonder material, doubly useful tonight. A product of America's chemical industry. Helping to keep our nation strong. But it was heavy. I put a turn of the rope around the bitt so that it wouldn't slide back on me, and kept pulling on the fucker.
The briefcase jumped into the air as it soaked up a few high-velocity rounds and landed on the deck, out of my reach. I was judging the distance to it when everything was drowned out by sound and light. Maybe they'd thrown up some star flares and started artillery bombardment. This was deep-shit industrial noise, loud enough to cause kidney failure, and fulgurating light, brighter than the sun.
Time to surrender. I scooted away from the cleat, waving my hands. I writhed loose from the remains of the air tank, but it still felt like someone was standing on my back in hockey skates. That allowed me to roll over, belly up like every fish in the Harbor, and stare into the unpolluted heavens. But there was something in the way. Fifty feet above me, a symbolic eyeball looked down from a halogen tornado: a chopper from CBS News.
They wouldn't blow us away on national TV, would they? Highly mediapathic. If they were still shooting, they were missing. I started pulling on the rope again. Boone wasn't helping me because he'd been pretty badly shot.
It went on forever. CBS News would have to edit. The viewing public was sitting around and watching as I endlessly hauled on a fucking rope. On and on and on. CBS watched, the snipers and the guards watched, Gallagher's crew watched, Boone kind of watched through unblinking eyes. No one said anything.
And finally I was holding a big, fat eye splice in my hands, a loop at the end of the Kevlar line, thick as my wrist. The end of the rope. The one that's supposed to go over the bitt. Sailors call it the bitter end. So I tossed it over the bitt, crawled way up to the prow, pulled myself up to my knees, and gave the
Extra Stout
the thumbs up.
The navy mine exploded and sent up a waterspout and a shock wave that nearly swatted the chopper out of the air. Pretty soon the ship started to listâor was that me? I looked up to wave goodbye to the snipers, but the water tower wasn't there anymore. The Everett River Bridge was above me. The derelicts were down there raising a couple of McDonald's pseudoshakes, toasting my health, cheering me on. Brothers in arms.
Joe Gallagher hauled us down the river into a sprawling media dawn. Everyone had come out. Tanya was the first on board; she and Bart climbed up on top of the bridge and hoisted the Toxic Jolly Roger. Tanya was perfect because she was a victim, she knew some things about chemistry, and she was pissed. The putrescine was a definite problem, but journalists who knew how to hold their noses could get down into the belly of the
Basco Explorer
and find incredible things.
It was all tremendously illegal, the evidence would have been useless in courtâif we had been cops. We weren't. And if a noncop gets some evidence, even through a criminal act, you can use it to prosecute.
Of course, even when you have legally correct evidence, corporations rarely suffer in this country. Look at any big government contractor for the Pentagon or NASA. They can get away with murder.
In the media, it's a different story. Three hundred years ago, in Massachusetts, criminals were put in stocks in the public square and mocked. Today, we can't send those executives to jail, but we can kick them out of civilized society, put them through unendurable emotional stress, and that's just as effective. So Pleshy and Laughlin were being kicked out of civilized society while Boone and I were being taken to the trauma center on a chopped ambulance.
I was suffering from several pissant flesh wounds. Dr. J. gave me that disappointing news. Boone had a sucking chest wound, which I hadn't noticed because I couldn't hear it, and because I was distracted by other things. He'd been able to roll onto his back and press the forearm of his rubber suit against the wound, lubricating the seal with his own blood. That didn't seal it completely but it got a little more air into that lung, kept him from passing out. He had to have half his lung and a good chunk of his liver taken out. No big deal, livers grow back if you don't booze them to death.
When I woke up, Debbie was sitting there in a bathrobe, holding my hand. Yes, we were talking guilt. Guilt and happiness. She was doing pretty well. Organophosphates are not bioaccumulative. If you survive the dose, they go away and you're back to normal.
The explosion of the mine threw Tom Akers way over to the far side of the railway and they didn't find him until the next day. They did an autopsy, because there were so many possible causes of death, and discovered that he was riddled with cancer. We got in touch with his doctor in Seattle and found out that he'd known of the problem for a couple of months; long enough, I guess, to build up a pretty intense hatred for Alvin Pleshy.
Now we're into the part where we sort out all the legal responsibility. Maybe I'll go to jail, who knows. Basco would have to spend lost of money on lawyers to really nail me, and they just declared bankruptcy.
Which sounds kind of satisfying, but it isn't, because bankruptcy is just another ploy, a way to get out of their union contracts and reorganize the company into a lean, mean, litigating machine. I've bought a lot of BMWs for a lot of corporate lawyers.
On the other hand, they're in huge trouble and eventually they really are going to pay. Dolmacher's evidence was suppressed for a few days but now it's out, and it's the mediapathic goods. The attorney general announced that any corporate execs who participated in the contamination of Dolmacher's body are going to be charged with
attempted murder. I hear they have lots of weight machines at the State Penitentiary.
Eventually, Basco's going to eat shit and die. So, when they let me out of the hospital, I picked up a magic marker at an office supply store, went down to the yacht club and drew Basco's logo onto the nose of our new Zodiac. This one was donated by the employees of a software company on Route 128.
Then I went for a spin around the Harbor. On my way out of the club, I blew by a nice fifty-foot yacht that was going out for an afternoon cruise. All the well-dressed people grinned, pointed, raised their glasses. I smiled, gave them the finger, and throttled her up.