He drops the motor into the water. Tranny pumps up the fuel line and starts it up. It starts on the first pull; Bruce Lee ran a tight ship.
As Hiro begins to motor down the open space, he is afraid that it is just a little cove in the ghetto. But this is just a trick of the lights. He rounds a corner and finds it stretching out for some distance. It is a sort of beltway that runs all the way around the Raft. Small streets and even smaller alleys lead from this beltway into the various ghettos. Through the scope, Hiro can see that their entrances are guarded. Anyone’s free to cruise around the beltway, but people are more protective of their neighborhoods.
The worst thing that can happen on the Raft is for your neighborhood to get cut loose. That’s why the Raft is such a tangled mess. Each neighborhood is afraid that the neighboring ’hoods are going to gang up on them, cut them loose, leave them to starve in the middle of the Pacific. So they are constantly finding new ways to tie themselves into each other, running cables over, under, and around their neighbors, tying into more far-flung ’hoods, or preferably into one of the Core ships.
The neighborhood guards are armed, needless to say. Looks like the weapon of choice is a small Chinese knockoff of the AK-47. Its metal frame jumps out pretty clearly on radar. The Chinese government must have stamped out an unimaginable number of these things, back in the days when they spent a lot of time thinking about the possibility of fighting a land war with the Soviets.
Most of them just look like indolent Third World militia the world over. But at the entrance to one neighborhood, Hiro sees that the guard in charge has a whip antenna sticking straight up in the air, sprouting from his head.
A few minutes later, they get to a point where the beltway is intersected by a broad street that runs straight into the middle of the Raft, where the big ships are—the Core. The closest one is a Nipponese containership—a low, flat-decked number with a high bridge, stacked with steel shipping containers. It’s webbed over with rope ladders and makeshift stairways that enable people to climb up into this container or that. Many of the containers have lights burning in them.
“Apartment building,” Tranny jokes, noting Hiro’s interest. Then he shakes his head and rolls his eyes and rubs his thumb against his fingertips. Apparently, this is quite the swell neighborhood.
The nice part of the cruise comes to an end when they notice several fast skiffs emerging from a dark and smoky neighborhood.
“Vietnam gang,” Tranny says. He puts his hand on Hiro’s and gently but firmly removes it from the outboard motor’s throttle. Hiro checks them out on radar. A couple of these guys have the little AK-47s, but most of them are armed with knives and pistols, obviously looking forward to some close-up, face-to-face contact. These guys in the boats are, of course, the peons. More important-looking gents stand along the edge of the neighborhood, smoking and watching. A couple of them are wireheads.
Tranny revs it up, turns into a sparse neighborhood of loosely connected Arabian dhows, and maneuvers through the darkness for a while, occasionally putting his hand on Hiro’s head and gently pressing it down so he doesn’t catch a rope with his neck.
When they emerge from the fleet of dhows, the Vietnamese gang is no longer in evidence. If this happened in daylight, the gangsters could track them by following Reason’s steam. Tranny steers them across a medium-sized street and into a cluster of fishing boats. In the middle of this area an old trawler sits, being cut up for scrap, cutting torches illuminating the black surface of the water all around. But most of the work is being done with hammers and cold chisels, which radiate appalling noise across the flat echoing water.
“Home,” Tranny says, smiling, and points to a couple of houseboats lashed together. Lights are still burning here, a couple of guys are out on the deck smoking fat, makeshift cigars, through the windows they can see a couple of women working in the kitchen.
As they approach, the guys on the deck sit up, take notice, draw revolvers out of their waistbands. But then Tranny speaks up in a happy stream of Tagalog. And everything changes.
Tranny gets the full Prodigal Son welcome: crying, hysterical fat ladies, a swarm of little kids piling out of their hammocks, sucking their thumbs and jumping up and down. Older men beaming, showing great gaps and black splotches in their smiles, watching and nodding and diving in to give him the occasional hug.
And on the edge of the mob, way back in the darkness, is another wirehead.
“You come in, too,” says one of the women, a lady in her forties named Eunice.
“That’s okay,” Hiro says. “I won’t intrude.”
This statement is translated and moves like a wave through the some eight hundred and ninety-six Filipinos who have now converged on the area. It is greeted with the utmost shock. Intrude? Unthinkable! Nonsense! How dare you so insult us?
One of the gap-toothed guys, a miniature old man and probable World War II veteran, jumps onto the rocking zodiac, sticks to the floor like a gecko, wraps his arm around Hiro’s shoulders, and pokes a spliff into his mouth.
He looks like a solid guy. Hiro leans into him. “Compadre, who is the guy with the antenna? A friend of yours?”
“Nah,” the guy whispers, “he’s an asshole.” Then he puts his index finger dramatically to his lips and shushes.
Chapter Fifty-Four
It’s all in the eyes. Along with picking handcuffs, vaulting Jersey barriers, and fending off perverts, it is one of the quintessential Kourier skills: walking around in a place where you don’t belong without attracting suspicion. And you do it by not looking at anyone. Keep those eyes straight ahead no matter what, don’t open them too wide, don’t look tense. That, and the fact that she just came in here with a guy that everyone is scared of, gets her back through the containership to the reception area.