The Rackham Files (19 page)

"Stealth coating. Plays hell with fuzz radar," I said, winked, fired up the engine, and made an unnecessary check of the system's digitals.

She had to talk louder, so she did. "My name's Kathy." I knew it was Kate Gallo. "You really going to Palm Springs? Right now?"

One good lie deserves another. "Right now," I said, and let the hover fans burp a puff of dust from beneath the Cellular's skirts.

"Aren't you even going to ask me if I want a ride?"

"Nope. Haven't time for you to collect luggage. And young girls are trouble." I blipped the engine.

She held up her shoulder bag, the kind that you could swing a cat in; the kind that alerts shopkeepers. "I travel light. And I'm free and twenty-one." She licked her lips, forced a desperate smile: "And I can be very friendly."

"I'll settle for repartee that keeps me awake on Interstate Five," I replied and waved her in as if already regretting my bigheartedness.

She piled in with a goodly flash of leg; levered her torso safety cushion into place as I backed in wheel-mode onto macadam. No sense in leaving a ground-effects dust pall behind. Then I eased onto the highway, ran the Lotus up through her gears manually and cut in the fans again for that lovely up-and-over sensation, nosing upward until we could have soared over anything but a big semi rig, before I settled us down again to a legal pace on wheels. All to give Kathy-Kate a wee thrill. It was the least I could do; she didn't know I'd locked her torso restraint. She couldn't get out if she wanted to, and that would've given her something entirely different. A wiwi thrill.

So far it had been so easy I was ashamed of myself. I hadn't needed cuffs on her. She didn't even know my name, or that she was headed for the Oakland jug—and she wasn't, but
I
didn't know
that
, of course. I got my first inkling of it as we passed the new bridge that led to Mare Island Shipyard.

Mare Island wasn't just fenced off: it boasted two men in civvies carrying Ingrams with the tubular stocks extended and thirty-round magazines. No suppressors. Those guys commanded real respect; not even an armored Mercedes could get past them, much less fat Harve with his puddle-jumping Lotus. But I intended to pass them by anyhow, over the Carquinez bridge and down to Oakland before rush hour with my unsuspecting "suspect."

So much for my intentions. Carquinez bridge was closed to southerly traffic—and patrolled. I didn't understand until, diverted toward the Martinez bridge some miles away, I noted the wall-to-wall traffic heading north from the Oakland area. I pulled up near a uniformed Vallejo officer who was directing traffic. I bawled, "What's the trouble over Carquinez?"

He looked at me as though I were an idiot. "You must be kidding," he called, but saw from my expression that I wasn't. "You got a radio in that thing?" I nodded. "Use it. And if you're thinking of heading south, think again," he shouted, and jumped at the dull gong of a minor collision behind him.

I punched the radio on and exchanged shrugs with the girl. In my rearview I could see the officer waving the fender-benders aside with no effort to ascertain injuries or to take videotapes. It was a bad intersection, already littered with glass and fluids from other recent collisions. Evidently the officer had special orders to keep the roadway clear at all costs.

"Okay," I said to myself as much as to the girl, "we'll detour east to Martinez," and squirted the Lotus ahead at a speed that should've put a black-and-white on my tail.

But long before I reached the Martinez bridge, the radio had told me why that was wishful thinking. A nervous announcer was saying, ". . . at the request of the White House, to participate in the Emergency Broadcast System. During this emergency most stations will remain on the air, broadcasting news and official information to the public in assigned areas. This is Station KCBS, San Francisco; we will remain on the air to serve the San Francisco County area. If you are not in this area, you should tune to other stations until you hear one broadcasting news and information in your area.

"You are listening to the Emergency Broadcast System serving the San Francisco County area. Do not use your telephone. The telephone lines should be kept open for emergency use. The Emergency Broadcast System has been activated—" Flick. The girl beat me to it, seeking another station.

". . . is Station KABL, Oakland. This station will broadcast news, official information and instruction for the Alameda County area—" Flick. This time I made the change.

I got KWUN, a Concord station. The girl couldn't have known it, but Concord was within ten miles of my place and by now I had no other goal but that fenced five-acre plot of mine on the backside of Mount Diablo. The announcer seemed disbelieving of his own news. "Radio Damascus claims that the Syrian attack on elements of the US Sixth Fleet was a legitimate response to violations of Syria's air space by our carrier-based aircraft. In Washington the Secretary of Defense defended the policy of hot pursuit against the bases from which Soviet-built Syrian fighter-bombers sank the US tender
Bloomsbury
about fifty miles west of Beirut early this morning. There has been no official response from Washington to the Syrian claim that the supercarrier
Nimitz
lies capsized in the Mediterranean after a nuclear near-miss by a Syrian cruise missile—"

"Oh shit," the girl and I said simultaneously.

We soon learned that most stations were simply repeating the prefabricated EBS messages we'd heard earlier, awaiting an official White House announcement. Little KWUN soon fell back on the same script as the others, but it had already told me enough. Syria's cruise birds were Soviet-made; her nukes probably Libyan. It no longer mattered whether the Soviets had known that Syria could screw nuclear tips onto those weapons. Far more important was the battle raging between our Sixth Fleet and the fast Soviet hoverships we had engaged as they poured from the Black Sea into the Aegean. I figured the
Nimitz
for a supercasualty, and I was right; once the Navy lost that big vulnerable beauty they'd be shooting at everything that moved. Our media weren't telling us, yet, that things were moving toward West Germany, too, on clanking caterpillar treads.

We found the Martinez bridge blocked, its southbound lanes choked with the solid stream of northbound traffic. Cursing, I took the road past the old Benicia historical monument because I knew it led to the water. "I hope you can swim, Kate," I called over the wail of the engine, "in case we get a malf halfway across Suisun Bay."

"Stop this thing," she screamed. I did. "We'd never make Palm Springs in traffic like this," she said, her dark eyes very round and smokily Sicilian. "
And why did you call me Kate?
"

"I know all my property," I said. "Legally, Kate Gallo, you are my temporary chattel property by California law. I can slap you around if I need to, or put you in handcuffs and gag you."

Her eyes became almost circular. "Bounty hunter," she accused.

"You got it, and it's got you. But I'm not taking you back to Oakland now, Kate. I'm heading for my home in Contra Costa County, which has a nice deep basement and all of Mount Diablo to protect us against whatever ails the Bay Area." She was struggling against her torso restraint. "Are you listening?"

In answer she turned toward me with claws flashing; raked my jacket sleeve in lightning swipes that almost drew blood through the Dacron; shifted her aim toward my face. It was not a move calculated to bring out my gentlemanly instincts.

I cuffed her with my gloved hand, lightly, twice—just enough to make her draw back to protect those lovely strong cheekbones. "You can go," I said, and repeated it as she gazed at me through defensive hands. I triggered the release on the torso restraint and, while she surged up from the seat, I added, "While you lie dying, remember I gave you a chance."

She hadn't panicked because she was still thinking ahead. She paused astraddle the door sill. "A Berkeley whizkid told me once that the only smart way out of Oakland, in an evacuation, was north along the coast. I'll make it."

"So will a million others." I jerked my head back toward the clogged arterials. "Did he also mention that you might starve? Did he mention the very few people there who might be willing to share food and drinkable water? I may take chances, Kate, but I haven't been stupid."

While she stood there undecided, for all I knew, heavyweight Soviet rockets might've been thundering up from Semipalatinsk—and from Nevada, for that matter. I jazzed the engine. "I asked if you can swim, Kate."

"Damn right," she shot back, and twinkletoed back into my Lotus. "You just make sure I don't have to haul
your
fat ass ashore."

And that was how I chose to spend Doomsday with a beautiful felon.

If I'd had a true unfettered choice, I'd have chosen someone other than Kate Gallo for a nuclear survival companion. And I probably would've chosen worse; Kate was no survivalist, but a born survivor—as I learned. As for Doomsday: you can't split a planet with a few gigatons of explosive, but you can sure doom a lot of its inhabitants.

I muttered something to that effect while keeping the Lotus above small, languid whitecaps in Suisun Bay. Kate Gallo stayed scrunched down, scanning the October sky as if by sheer willpower she could keep it clear of hostile weapons. Halfway across the two-mile stretch of water she showed optimistic colors. "So what do you do with me if this turns out to be a false alarm?"

"Hadn't thought about it," I said, shouting to compete with the fan noises. "Let you give yourself up, maybe, if you can convince me you're through making dumb decisions. But don't count on—oh,
Jeez-us,
" I finished, glancing to my left toward the soaring bridge structure a mile distant.

Near the bridge center, vaulting the rail of concrete and steel, a tiny oblong of four-door sedan climbed aloft, etched on a hard sapphire sky, propelled from behind by a determined eighteen-wheeler. Shards of concrete and metal sparkled. A minuscule fire-bloom trailed the sedan as it cartwheeled nearly two hundred feet to the water. When the big rig jackknifed, its trailer found the same hole in the rail and (okay, admit it, Rackham) I had the satisfaction of seeing the bully ooze through the gap and begin a one-and-a-half pike into the bay. The rig moved so slowly that I saw its driver, ant-size from my view, leap to the safety of the bridge. However small his chances, they were better than those of anybody a few miles behind him in Oakland.

I guessed that the bridge incident was being multiplied by drivers made mindless by terror from San Jose to Norfolk. We couldn't hear the truck caterwaul past the railing, nor even its splash, and our distance somehow insulated us. In minutes we'd be nosing into the reality of waterfront chaos in Martinez.

The dashboard map display reminded me we'd have to cross one major arterial, then skirt the Concord NavWep station en route to the winding roads near my place. With traffic like we were seeing, those odds had no appeal whatever. Our chances would be better with the bay itself as our conduit—but not if I kept the Lotus's engine near redline for much longer. "Don't worry if you feel water," I called to Kate Gallo, and eased back on the pedal while turning the wheel.

The worry was all mine. I passed under the highway bridge heading up the bay, fully aware that an errant wave could toss a gallon of water into the fan intakes and send us skating like a flat rock; a rock that would disintegrate before it sank, at the speed we were crossing. A dozen big powerboats and twice that many smaller ones crisscrossed the bay, creating a nightmarish chop that slapped our bottom. Twice I heard strangled surges as bits of spray entered the fan intakes. I'd destroyed an off-road Porsche that way once, and my sphincter didn't unpucker until we droned up the mouth of the San Joaquin River.

I took the first boat ramp that wasn't clogged, which was on the outskirts of tatty little Pittsburg, and ignored the outraged yells of folks who were trying to clog it as the Lotus wheels found purchase. We fled from the waterfront, eastward through town, between rows of Pittsburg's down-at-the-heel date palms that, like the tall, rawboned strippers in Vallejo, promised a lot but never put out much.

Kate called to me between gear changes: "Why is the traffic so light here?"

"Just guessing," I replied, "but Pittsburg and Antioch have been small towns so long, they don't realize how near they are to ground zero." I still don't know if that's the right answer. I just know a hell of a lot of nice folks died thinking a nuclear strike was a respecter of city limits.

At the outskirts of Antioch, with the brush-dotted hump of Mount Diablo looming nearly a mile high ahead of us, I turned south and passed wrecks at several intersections before turning onto Lone Tree Way. The power lines hadn't yet fallen across this broad boulevard, but some poor bastard's old highwing Luscombe was hung up like a bat on a clothesline between two highline towers, smoking and sparking as it dribbled molten aluminum ninety feet to the dry grass below. To wrench Kate's attention from the grisly clinkers that jerked in the cockpit, I pointed ahead. "Just past the airport we hit Deer Valley Road. No more towns now." I pulled the phone from under the dash, coded a number, gave the handset to Kate. "I need both hands; this road becomes a gymkhana up ahead. See if you can get through."

"We're not supposed to use the phone," she said. "Your wife?"

"My sister Sharon, in a San Jose suburb. If I'm any judge, she and Ernie and the kids'll be at my place before we are." Which just goes to show I'm a lousy judge.

Relaxing too soon can be suicide. In the years since the '81 depression, when I lucked into some cash and bought my country place, I'd driven the Deer Valley-Marsh Creek route a thousand times—before this always enjoying the extravagant curlicues of two-lane blacktop winding between slopes so steep they hid the major bulk of Mount Diablo. I hadn't met a single car since turning onto the creek road; I knew every ripple on the road shoulder; and I was so near home that I'd begun to worry about Shar, taking my own safety for granted. That was when the old black Lincoln slewed around a blind bend, fishtailing toward us.