The descent, p.26
The Descent, page 26
By now the boy is exhausted. I know it is over. ‘Do you want him?’ I ask.
The boy looks up at me as if from a very far place.
‘We can cut him loose if you want. Let him live.’
Leo closes his eyes, the rod shaking in his ruined hands, the fish there just below us, hulking and blue against the darker blue of the water. And then he looks at me and nods, just a single drop of the chin.
I pull out my knife, grab the line as close to the water as I can, place the blade against the line, and cut the fish free. It hovers there a moment, unaware, and then with one flick of its tail it is gone.
Leo collapses to the deck, his little legs folding up beneath him. He sits staring at his hands and out at the ocean and back at his hands and at the rod there on the cockpit floor. I think he will cry, but no tears come, and he is very quiet all the time I am bandaging his hands and he never says a word again about the fish.
Julie and Fema return from the city as dusk is colouring the horizon. By then, Leo is asleep below. We load the supplies, and Fema sets to preserving as much of the fresh fruit and vegetables as possible. I tell Julie about Leo’s marlin, and she listens in silence when I tell her about his hands.
We are sitting together in the cockpit when we see a launch round the breakwater and start speeding towards us. Its masthead light blinks over the darkening water and the red and green navigation lights shine against the coastline. We sit and watch it approach on a steady course. Soon we can make out the superstructure and the pennants flying, and the deck gun and a solitary figure standing on the flying bridge. It is Hargreaves’ launch, the one that brought us through the canal.
Soon the launch is alongside and Hargreaves steps aboard carrying a big duffel bag slung over each shoulder. We go below and he puts the bags on the saloon table.
‘I have a message for you,’ Hargreaves says. ‘It came in today on the classified wire.’ He opens the satchel slung crosswise over his right shoulder and produces a single sheet of paper.
He reads: ‘“Status, Bora Bora: do not approach. Extreme danger to navigation and life. Island believed controlled in entirety by Alpha Omega. High probability Yu Wan Junior present. If approach imperative, seek contact Freyja on west coast of the island of Taha’a, Sandrine boatbuilders, Ruutia harbour. Recognition code prompt: last stem of the Norse rose. Response: a lost fable five times never told.”’
He looks across the table at us. ‘Got it?’
I nod.
‘Are you sure?’ He folds the paper. ‘I cannot leave this with you.’
Julie and I repeat the message back.
Hargreaves replaces the paper in his satchel. ‘And there is this.’ He places a red waterproof bag on the table, opens it and takes out a dossier, which he places on the table. There is a crest on the front with the words Central Intelligence Agency inscribed in the outer circumference. ‘You sure must have friends in high places.’
We both shrug.
‘Anyway, it’s none of my business. But please be careful, whatever it is you have to do. I brought a few things to help you on your way.’
He reaches into the first duffel bag and withdraws two cardboard boxes and puts them on the table. ‘MREs,’ he says. ‘Meals, ready to eat. These ones are my favourite. M&Ms with peanuts, for the boy. It’s candy.’
‘Leo will be so happy,’ says Julie. ‘Thank you, Captain.’
From the second bag he produces a large military backpack. ‘It’s a complete medical trauma kit,’ he says. ‘Oh, yeah, and I nearly forgot.’ He sets a magazine on the table. It is a copy of Time, dated two and a half years ago, dog-eared and greasy. The faded front cover features a photograph of a tired-looking man with the caption: “Can President Ashworth lead us out of this?”
I stare at the cover a long time. It is the man from the interrogation room in San Cris. We sit in the cockpit and watch the launch move away and disappear behind the breakwater.
We set sail for Bora Bora next morning. That evening, after Leo is in bed, we set the self-steering gear and go through the contents of the CIA dossier. The first document is marked CLASSIFIED. It is heavily redacted, dated from the early years of the African War. The title page is emblazoned with the words Operation Tirade. We read in silence, side by side. The chief contractor, Argent Pharmaceuticals, is tasked with the development and deployment of a new drug whose stated purpose is to cause reproductive sterilisation of the patient, male or female. Two hundred million doses were delivered in the first phase and subsequently administered to the entire population of Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Togo and Benin, regardless of age or current fertility. The document states that the purpose of Operation Tirade is to prevent further suffering through alleviation of resource scarcity in selected territories, and to secure agricultural production potential for export.
Julie stares at me across the table, horror in her eyes. ‘Xoese,’ is all she manages to say.
The second file, also classified, is very short, just two redacted pages. It refers to a trial conducted by Argent Pharmaceuticals in a small village in Ghana called Kejabil. The date of the trial has been redacted. A new drug was being tested, the purpose of which is not mentioned. One thousand, three hundred and fifty-two people of all ages and both sexes were inoculated and observed over a period of twelve hours. The trial was classified as a failure. All of the subjects perished within three hours of being inoculated.
We stare at the paper, overwhelmed.
The last file contains a copy of a recent cabinet briefing entitled Global Situation Report. Julie and I read in silence. The CIA estimates the current global population as eight hundred million, less than one fifteenth of the Repudiation peak. Of these, less than a hundred million are likely to be fertile females. Functioning, democratic or semi-democratic governments remain in a few countries. The United States itself, severely weakened by the protracted civil war, remains one of the dominant global powers. Fractured totalitarian regimes make up most of the other semi-functioning states. The majority of the world’s population now lives in small, isolated communities with a variety of local governing systems. No functioning Earth-orbiting satellites are believed to exist.
After the first page we both just stop reading. Julie folds the papers in half and puts them back into the bag. ‘Thank you, Mister President,’ she says. ‘But we don’t need this. We are living it.’
‘He took Papa’s manuscript,’ I say. ‘And your vial.’
‘Probably because they were too damaging to him personally, and to the prestige of the United States,’ Julie says. ‘Imagine if it got out.’
We sit a moment, side by side, and then I go on deck to check the self-steering gear.
May 2033
That spring, more than eleven years after launching his special military operation in Ukraine, the Russian Federation’s president-for-life died of cancer in hospital in Lausanne, Switzerland. All that wealth, of course, in the end, couldn’t stop the inevitable. The day he died, his successor launched a new offensive to capture the last strip of independent Ukraine that remained along the border with Slovakia. It seems we have war in our DNA.
By then a new pandemic, this time not launched by Boss Pharma, but caused by a natural mutation of the initial Operation Red virus, was burning across the world like an out-of-control wildfire. There were a lot of those burning, too. Australia had just suffered its worst summer fire season in history, with over half of the country burned to ash and thousands of people dead. According to the UN, a mere rump by then, global population had peaked and was now dropping. That was also the month that Canada voted in a Bragg-inspired referendum to join the USA. They were small, scared and wanted Big Brother’s protection. It was almost Orwellian. Bryce was right. It was all going to shit.
I was sitting in my office when I got a coded text from Bryce. I waited ten minutes, grabbed my purse and left the building and walked to the coffee place where we would pretend to bump into one another, hiding in plain sight. We feigned delight and sat down with our lattes. The place was packed with sleepwalkers. We grabbed a table outside, where it was nice and noisy.
He put his foot next to mine, applied some pressure. ‘Tell me about Kejabil.’
I’d read the documents that I had delivered to the CEO of Boss Pharma that day, of course, and later heard the Boss talking on the phone about a test gone wrong. ‘From what I can tell, it was an accident. Pharma was testing a new inoculant. It didn’t work right.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It wasn’t supposed to work that fast.’
Bryce leaned forward, lowered his voice. ‘That fast?’
‘Yeah. They all died within a few hours. It was supposed to take a few weeks and look like botulism, you know, the plague.’ Shame burned through me like a runaway infection, and I could feel the tears building behind my eyes, a dam ready to burst.
‘My God,’ said Bryce. ‘Fucking animals.’
The dam burst. Bryce handed me a napkin, let me work through it.
‘I’ve heard that the group is going to be meeting soon,’ Bryce said after a while. ‘Sometime in the next few months. The Pacific, I’m told.’
‘I haven’t heard anything about it,’ I said, blowing my nose.
‘You will.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘As soon as you hear anything, let me know.’
I smiled, pretended to chit chat. You never know who’s snooping. ‘Sure.’
‘It’s getting close. We need a big story, one we can share with the world. One that will knock them all out of their stupor.’
‘Bigger than Kejabil?’
‘Way bigger. You need to keep notes, but you also need to get a voice record of it. All of it.’
I blanched. ‘The Boss never allows it. Never has.’
‘Well, you’re going to have to find a way. We need this. I’m counting on you. We all are.’
‘Jesus, Bryce. I don’t know if I can. Can’t someone else do it?’ I was feeling distinctly wobbly.
He grabbed my hand. Anyone could have seen us. ‘There is no one else. Don’t you understand? It’s taken us years to get inside the Boss’s organisation, and no one else has been able to penetrate to your level of access in any of the other organisations. You’ve told me yourself. You are Alpha Omega’s de-facto secretary.’
I could feel the blood draining from my head. Everything was going dark around the edges. ‘I don’t feel well,’ I said, putting my head in my hands.
‘Keep it together, bae. We need you.’
I was high-key not happy.
‘Don’t worry,’ Bryce said. ‘You’re going to slay this.’
I let it pass through me, opened my eyes. I squeezed his hand and then pulled mine away, regained some composure. ‘Okay, I’ll think about it. About how to do it, I mean. And I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything.’
The fightback was about to begin. And I was going to be on point.
Wife
I stand at the wheel and watch the slow progress of the clouds across the water and the changing colour of the thrown shadows and the way the rain cells shift and disappear and then appear again from the base of the clouds and how the sunlight refracts across the overwhelming, bursting, emptiness of it.
The Pacific lives with us, and we with her, the incongruity of our existence manifest in each cloud-strewn dawn, each night’s quantum shattering of stars. Night comes like a law of physics, and it is as if blinds are being drawn and suddenly we can see forever, all the way back to the beginning of time, and it is almost too much to bear so far is it from any real human understanding. And each night I stand at the wheel, piloting our small vessel through this impossibility, and I think that it is like being dead and living forever.
I read Yuval’s Years of Warning, the book Lachie Ashworth gave me that day in Panama. It covers the crucial years from 2020 to 2025 and was published just before the start of the Repudiation. In it, he talks of the increasing instability of the global economic system, how national debt in the major countries continued to balloon, with real wealth increasingly concentrated in the hands of a very small and increasingly powerful group of people scattered around the globe. The average person in the developed world worked harder for less, with more of their effort going towards financing the debt owed to that same group of mega-rich individuals. He writes of the rising impact of climate change and what he describes as the completely inadequate, conscience-assuaging efforts to combat it, a series of empty national pledges and a concerted effort to unload the cost of mitigation and adaptation onto those least able to pay and least able to object – the young, the poor, and future generations. Yuval reserves special disdain for corporate boards, whose efforts to appear to be acting for good while actively lobbying against meaningful change he describes as shameful and duplicitous. Despite decades of so-called action to reduce emissions, through the 2020s global greenhouse-gas emissions actually rise. The plight of the poorer nations receives special attention, two chapters detailing the hopelessly inadequate pledges of aid, largely never delivered, and the subsequent rise of radical autocracies in those countries, supported by the big northern dictatorships such as Russia, China, and North Korea. The war in Ukraine dragged on, consuming more lives and more of the democracies’ precious resources, contributing to growing worldwide food shortages and diverting effort and money that could have been spent fighting climate change. The last chapter warns of a global rise in fascism, and the perils of not acting decisively to reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions. The final sentence of Yuval’s book is: ‘But there is still time, if we work together, to avert the worst of these consequences, and create a world in which we can all live decent lives.’
I put the book down and look up into the cockpit. Julie is there at the wheel. Her hair blows in the breeze. White clouds pearl the horizon behind her, and the sun shines on the brown skin of her face and shoulders and bare arms, her long legs supple and responsive to the surging rhythm of the ocean beneath her.
She glances down into the cabin, perhaps sensing I am looking at her, smiles at me a moment, and then looks away to the horizon. I sit watching her guide Providence over the running current that foams and pulses beneath us. She is wearing a pair of loose khaki shorts slung low on her hips and a white T-shirt which she has tied up tight under her breasts so that the topography and colour of her shows through the thin cotton.
I join her in the cockpit.
After a while she says: ‘Do you ever wonder what happened to them?’
‘Who?’
‘Everyone at the Village de la Paix.’
‘Sometimes.’
‘I was happy there. Really happy.’ She looks at me for a moment and then back to the horizon. ‘At first, I was ashamed of feeling that way. But not anymore. Especially after listening to those radio transmissions. I hope it survives.’
‘Me too.’
‘And you know something else?’ she says. ‘You and Leo would have been happy there too. I know you would have.’
‘Maybe, Julie. Maybe. But we have a job to do.’
‘I know, and I’m with you, Kwe. I always have been. We’ll find Becky. I believe that. And after, we have to find a way to live, just like Papa said.’
‘We can go home.’
‘Home. I don’t even know what that is anymore.’
That afternoon I am dozing in our cabin, the sea air flowing over me soft and cool, Julie at the wheel and Fema forward with Leo watching for flying fish, when a change of course wakes me. I can hear Leo and Fema talking excitedly and Julie answering back from the cockpit. And then the feeling through the boat as Julie spills power from the main and Providence suddenly slows. I jump up and clamber into the cockpit.
‘What’s wrong?’
Julie points. There, about four or five miles off the port bow, a ship of some sort.
‘Leo spotted it about an hour ago, and we’ve been getting closer to it ever since. It doesn’t look like it’s moving.’
Julie hands me the binoculars and I glass the horizon, focusing in. It is a cargo ship, large, with a superstructure and stack and open foredeck. A Panamax, similar in configuration to Ocean Transporter. No markings or flags that I can see, and no wake.
‘Looks like she’s adrift.’
Julie and I look at each other, both thinking the same thing, or versions of it.
‘They may need help,’ I say. ‘Stay this course.’
She frowns, bites her lower lip.
Half an hour later and we can see a thin ribbon of smoke drifting from what looks like a hole in the ship’s bow, just above the waterline. The forward cargo holds are all open.
‘What’s that sound?’ says Julie.
I turn my ear but all I can hear is the sound of the hull moving through the water and the wind in the sails.
‘There it is again,’ she says. ‘It sounds like …’ She hesitates. ‘Like guns.’
I raise the binoculars again, scan the ship again. ‘Fall off,’ I say.
Julie turns the wheel and eases the main, and Providence picks up speed. Slowly the far side of the ship’s hull comes into view.
‘There are two ships,’ I say. ‘A smaller one is tied up alongside.’
‘Maybe they’re providing assistance.’
Then I hear it, the distinct staccato sound of gun fire – automatic weapons. ‘Not assistance. They’ve been boarded.’
Julie gasps. ‘What should we do?’
‘Fema,’ I shout.
She turns and looks back at me.
