"Sorry to sneak up on you," Valentine said. He took a step into the light.
"Mother of- You frightened me."
Valentine noticed her arms were goose pimpled. "I'm sorry. Wrong of me to creep around my hosts' house."
"No, not that. Your eyes." She rattled out the words sta-catto.
"My eyes?"
She shivered again. "They were-glowing."
Perfect. You're the wolfman to her now, Ghost. "Glowing?"
"Like an animal's at night, a cat's. Sort of orange yellow. I've never seen a man's eyes do that."
"Maybe they caught the light just right."
"Maybe. Maybe my imagination, too. Long day," she said, her words returning to their usual genteel pace.
"Sony about your stack. What were you doing?"
"You can play mah-jongg solitare, too. You take the chips out of the bag and stack them in a certain way. The trick is to not look at the ones on the lower levels as you put it together. Then you pull them off in matching pairs."
"Didn't get enough after dinner?"
"I couldn't sleep. It relaxes me. My mind had too much to work on. This is like counting sheep."
"I'm sorry your parents came up in the conversation."
Some of the warmth that had been in her eyes earlier in the evening returned. "No. Oh, no, it wasn't that. You see, my grandfather talked to Captain Utari earlier. The commodore decided to let me captain the Thunderbolt. My first real command."
She led him out onto the balcony, and they looked down into the bay. The Thunderbolt looked like a toy ship.
"You're lucky Utari didn't want her."
She smiled. "He hates anything without a sail. Says there's no seamanship in engines."
"But you don't feel that way."
"You don't know sailors, David. My first real ship. My first command. I loved her even as we limped into the harbor." The light trickling out of the dining room played across her dusky features. "I can't wait to put her to sea again. She's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."
Valentine could have said the same about the Thunderbolt's new commander. He would have, if there hadn't been a hint of anxiety in her eyes as she met his gaze, wary against the return of that inhuman glow.
rt, Jamaica. February: Like Malta in the Mediterranean or Singapore on the Krai Peninsula, Jamaica is the key to the waterways around her. Dwarfed by larger neighbors-Cuba to the north and Haiti to the west-the mountainous little island of blinding white sand and lush green hills sits like a tollboth in the center of a network of water routes around her. North is the passage between Cuba and Haiti leading to the coast of Florida and the Bahamas, west is the Yucatan channel off the coast of Mexico, and to the south is the Latin America coast. Far to the east lay tiny island chains and cays that mark the boundary like a lattice curtain between the Caribbean and the Atlantic proper.
In the days of the great buccaneers Morgan, Blackbeard, and Captain Kidd, the legendary pirates of the Caribbean pillaged French and Spanish possessions in the New World, spending their loot in the sinful dens that the seventeenth-century Babylon, Port Royal, boasted. The latter-day freebooters of Jamaica are after no such glittering wealth. Their desired booty is limited to food, medical supplies, technology, and shipbuilding materials.
The latest ruler of Jamaica rests near the old center of Kingston around the great southern bay. But the Kurian's realm extends only to the foothills of the Blue Mountains. These peaks, named for their color as seen from the sea, give the island its serrated spine that resembles a sea serpent resting in the Caribbean. Outside the Kurian's land, isolated coastal communities live in the primitive conditions of the Arawaka Indians Columbus discovered, building huts of thick grasses and banana leaves, or of mud and thatch. A few are lucky or powerful enough to control one of the pre-2022 buildings still standing after the titanic wave that washed across the Caribbean, followed by foundation-shattering quakes and roof-ripping hurricanes.
In Montego Bay, a bloody-handed sea lord rules with a brutality that would curl Morgan's mustache, and among the central mountains, an unnamed band of killers, thought to be the remnants of some drug kingpin's gang, leave piles of severed heads along the jungle trails to warn trespassers away. But for the most part, the Jamaicans are a gentle people, taking the bounty nature sewed in the rich volcanic soil of the island and the surrounding sea and sharing what little they have with the generosity of people who have known hunger and misfortune between periods of plenty.
One bay to the north, however, is an exception to the rule in a number of ways. The pre-2022 buildings are in as good a repair as local materials can make them-though one wave-gutted, multistory hotel stands untouched in its beachfront location-and hundreds of white bungalows of wood and thatch show the best example of what can be created out of clay, leaves, and coconut coir. Two thick palisades of wood run for miles from the high hills to the west to a great oval bulge along the flatter ground south and east, bordered by fields of rice and corn with the jungle cut back from the walls.
Sailing ships now dot a broad concrete pier that at one time berthed cruise ships. At the end of the pier is a gray-and-rust ship, a relic of the Old World dominating the center of the bay like a castle's keep. She sits separated by thirty feet of water crossed by a floating bridge leading to a portal in her hull big enough to drive a truck into. She is a strange sort of ship, four decks of superstructure crowded over the bow, and perhaps a hundred yards of what used to be flight deck broken only by the housing for the ship's offset stack. At the top of her aerial stack, a white flag with a
red cross alternately ripples and droops in the shifting noontime air.
Farther out in the shallow waters of the bay, on a calm day it is easy to see the outlines of sunken shipping, now encrusted with coral, forming an underwater, unbuoyed wall guarding the seaward approaches to the dock. At the south end of the great concrete pier, a gate stands beneath a guard tower, allowing passage of landward trade, as well.