I yanked the revolver out of his belt, grabbed it by the barrel, and laid open his right eyebrow. I grabbed his keys and ran for the van.
“I THOUGHT S.T. WAS MAN OF PEACE,”
SAYS SHOCKED ROOMMATE.
GEE TERRORIST'S DESPERATE ESCAPE FROM BOMB SITE INSIDE: Sangaman Tayhr: Jekyll & Hyde Personality?
While I was headed crosstown, it started to rain. Downtown there was a waterfront park and that's where I assembled the Zodiac. Out on the water, a coast guard cutter was towing an eighty-foot pleasure palace out away from a yacht club, into the open water.
GEE CAR FOUND NEAR YACHT CLUB
ABANDONED IN MINING ATTEMPT?
I recognized the yacht; Alvin Pleshy liked to go fishing in it. It was being shadowed by a couple of fireboats and cops were swarming around on the decks.
PLESHY'S TERROR CRUISE
S.T.'S BOMBS ON EX-V.P.'S YACHT
“He hated Pleshy from the beginning”
I just took it out of there nice and easy, didn't crank up the throttle until I was out past the airport, and then ran full tilt until all I could see was waves, and rain, and rain - a Nor'easter bearing down from Greenland. A big blue nasty-looking son of a bitch. We had an exposure suit in there, so I pulled it on, then crammed myself back into my Levi's so I wouldn't be so fucking orange. I pointed her north, into the storm clouds, into the waves. Nothing could find me in that. Not Cigarettes, not CG cutters, neither helicopters nor satellites.
Or so I thought until the helicopter gunship came up on my stern.
This was just what I was afraid of. Once they pinned the terrorist label on me, they didn't have to screw around with cops and warrants anymore. Life during wartime.
It was one of the new ones with the incredibly skinny bodies, the occupants sitting virtually on top of each other. A guy on top to fly it, a guy on the bottom to manage all those guns, missiles, bombs and rockets.
They couldn't possibly fly through this shit. The rain was just starting to come down heavy, we had a forty-or fifty-knot headwind. But I was remembering a rescue operation in the spring when they plucked some Soviets off a freighter in weather this bad.
Of course, the freighter had been stationary. I sure as hell wasn't. I'd long since stopped cutting through the waves and started riding up and down them. The water doesn't actually move; the surface of it just goes up and down. So if you're in a Zodiac, and you head into a thirty-foot roller - like that one, right in front of me - you are going up, skipper. Fast. And then you're going down, virtually in free fall. As soon as you bottom out, the acceleration squashes you into the floorboards again and you're on your way up, leaving your stomach somewhere down between your testes. If your boat is strong enough to handle the G-forces, you're fine. Otherwise it just gets thrust beneath the surface and breaks apart. That wasn't about to happen to the Zodiac.
First I thought a bolt of red lightning had struck, but actually it was a river of Gatling gun fire digging a hole in the wave right in front of me, or was it above me? When there is no horizon, you can never tell. This was called firing across the bow. A warning.
But it was too kind to call it a river of fire. It was a series of tentative spurts, all in different places, kind of like my first orgasm. One of those spurts landed about thirty feet behind/ below me, and I got to thinking maybe it wasn't a warning at all. Maybe it was just poor workmanship.
Just for the hell of it, I tried sighting down my index finger, tried to see if I could keep it aimed at that helicopter. And it was impossible, I couldn't even keep my eyes aimed at it. Those poor bastards couldn't shoot straight. They didn't have a hope.
I figured this out as the water was tossing me full into the air, into free fall off a liquid cliff. A big gust of wind hit me at the top and almost flipped the boat over. I saw a wall of black rain from that vantage point, and then all I could see was the next wave; it was bigger. The chopper was a few yards away; I could look the bastards right in the goggles. Then it was far above me, twisting in a gust, and I almost lost sight. Which meant they could lose me. So I tried to head diagonally away from them.
Anyway, it didn't matter, because they couldn't hit me with any of that firepower. Not in this. So I flipped them the bird - maybe they'd pick it up on infrared - and headed for Maine. I had full tanks to run on, and they'd take me fifty miles. All the raindrops in the sky suddenly merged. I didn't see the chopper again.
I ran out of gas half a mile off the coast sometime before noon. It was time to start hitting the LSD. I'd been up for more than twenty-four hours, I hurt real bad, I'd thrown my back out hauling on that ripcord and now I had to paddle this son of a bitch through a rainstorm. Fortunately the swell had gone down to about five feet.. I was carrying the acid on a sheet of paper in my wallet, a sheet of blotter paper with a bogus map drawn on it, stuck behind Debbie's graduation picture. When I took it out, I sat and looked at that photo for a while and started crying. A poor, utterly fucked, duck-squeezer castaway, bobbing in the Atlantic, soaking in the rain, sobbing over his girlfriend.
That went on for about ten minutes and then I put a little corner of the paper into my mouth and sat down to wait. In about twenty minutes I was able to paddle the boat without groaning in pain. In thirty minutes I didn't feel anything. In forty I was enjoying it more than I'd enjoyed anything since my last time in the sack with this girl, so I took another half. In an hour, I was ready to take on a Cigarette. My teeth hurt because I was paddling through the cold rain with them bared in a huge shit-eating grin. Once every hour or so I actually remembered to check the compass to see if I was headed for land.