‘Mr Peter, sir?’

Lee had snuck up on him again. A Malaccan-Chinese from a 300-year-long line of pirates, Mr Lee was always doing that. Pete tried to rearrange his features into a sunny smile, but Lee knew him too well and responded with a pitying shake of the head. Pete was notorious for his ill temper in the hours leading up to a job, and try as he might to control it, his face was always clouded over and dark until they were safely away. Frankly, he resented the necessity for the whole smuggling business and would have done almost anything other than getting a normal job to avoid it. But he couldn’t, so here they were.

‘Hey, Lee. What’s up, mate?’ Pete tried for a light tone, the sort of thing his fellow Tasmanian Errol Flynn might have pulled off if he’d gone into smuggling and full-time surf bummery. Instead he just came off as clipped and nervous. He noticed Fifi and Jules throw a curious glance back his way. They’d only been with him eighteen months, but like Mr Lee they’d learned to read his moods with an almost preternatural accuracy. It was the legacy of living so close together and taking things right up to the edge.

‘Something is up, Mr Peter.’

‘Okay. I’m waiting.’ Jeez, he wished he could loosen up.

‘The Pong Su, she is changing course, sir. She will not meet up with us if she continues on her new heading.’

Pete was dressed in ripped board shorts and a sun-faded sky-blue cotton shirt. The Tropic of Cancer was well north of them and the day would have been uncomfortably warm were it not for a gentle sou’-wester, which only just bellied out the sails but did little to dry the sweat pooling between the breasts of his female crew.

‘Come see. I show,’ said Lee.

Jules finished scraping a plate of grilled fish scraps over the side and used the dish to shade her eyes as she straightened up. ‘Is there something the matter, Pete?’ she called out in her rather posh English accent, the sort of accent his mother would have called ‘all peaches and cream’.

‘Dunno yet,’ he answered. ‘Could be. Let’s be ready to split just in case. You and Fifi better kit up too, soon as you’re ready.’

‘Righty-o,’ she said. The two girls set about their cleaning chores with added vigour. Both were athletic blondes in their early twenties and resembled each other closely enough that Pete had long ago taken to calling them ‘the Twins’, even though Jules was a Brit, a trust-fund exile from Surrey, while Fifi had run away from a trailer park in Oregon at the age of fifteen. They brought a rare and valuable mix of skills to the Diamantina. Jules had a masters in accounting from the London School of Economics, and her father, the late Lord Balwyn, was a two-time winner of the Fastnet race and a board member of the Royal Thames Cruising Yacht Squadron. Or he had been on the RTCYS board, until Scotland Yard had come calling at the Manor one day with a warrant for his arrest on a hundred and twenty-nine charges of fraud and tax evasion.

Fifi, the ship’s cook, on the other hand, had not even finished high school and her only inheritance was genetic. Her mom, one of Larry Flynt’s very first Hustler models, had bequeathed her some good looks and a mighty fine arse, but apart from an explosive temper and a morally flexible attitude to life’s manifold challenges, that was about it. And compared to her mom, Fifi was still kind of uptight. She’d left home after her fourth ‘stepdad’, the aptly named Randy, a shiftless, unemployed crab-pot repairman, had suggested they have a threesome and go on Springer to tell their story. He’d heard they could score a trip to Chicago, a free stay in a motel, and two hundred dollars’ cash for expenses. Fifi was on the road, with her thumb in the air, about half an hour later.

She was a great cook, however, and hell on mag wheels with a loaded weapon.

Pete could hear the Twins rummaging through the gun locker just beyond the forward bulkhead as he sat at the nav station and tried to make sense of the screens in front of him. Even with the air-con running, it was hot below decks, and the prospect of a transfer going bad gave the confines of the boat a claustrophobic feeling. The Diamantina was fitted out for high luxury, thanks to her former owners, the dot-com greedheads, and Pete was able to sink into a soft leather swivel chair adapted for maritime use from a Herman Miller original, but nothing about sitting in front of the flat panel displays in the small nook outside his personal cabin made him happy. He could see immediately what Lee was talking about as he watched a computer-generated track of the Pong Su, the North Korean freighter scheduled to swap four million dollars’ worth of perfectly counterfeited US currency for a ‘full stick’ – one million dollars of the real deal bundled away in the Diamantina’s stronghold. That money represented the profits of three high-risk dope runs from Mexico up to California. It wasn’t the sort of business they’d normally choose to get into, but the blow-out in Bali had left him few options.

Now it seemed he had fewer still. Forty minutes ago the Pong Su had deviated sharply off course, and was apparently running rudderless. It looked for all the world as though she’d lost steering.

‘No good, Mr Peter,’ avowed Lee. ‘Look here, and here too.’

It was only then that Pete realised that the Pong Su wasn’t the only ship in trouble. Five other vessels within the Diamantina’s radar bubble had all likewise veered off course and appeared to be heading out of the designated shipping lanes.

‘Pete, you’d better come up on deck. There’s something very strange happening off to the north.’ It was Jules, with Fifi at her elbow. After cleaning up they had changed into their rig for the handover. Both were now dressed in ballistic vests and wearing combat harnesses weighed down with reloads for the Vietnam-era M16s and grenade launchers they would take from the armoury fifteen minutes before the rendezvous. But Pete Holder was beginning to doubt there’d be any rendezvous today, or ever.

‘What do you mean “strange”?’ he asked.

‘I mean odd, weird, right out of the bloody ordinary, Pete. It looks like a storm front came out of that heat haze to the north, but… well… you’ll need to see for yourself.’

Grunting in frustration, he pushed himself up out of the chair and hurried up on deck. Moving forward to the bow, shielding his eyes, he saw immediately what she meant. Far to the north of them, half the sky seemed to be taken up with the queerest, most exotic-looking storm front he’d ever seen. It appeared to sparkle and hang still in the air. It must have been a long way distant, because it appeared from beneath the horizon and climbed away into the stratosphere. Just standing, watching it, he felt insignificant and deeply vulnerable.

‘Radio’s not working!’ Fifi called out from below.

‘Radio’s fine…’ he started to say, then stopped. They’d been monitoring the airwaves for any US or Mexican government traffic, using the yacht’s high-gain antennae to eavesdrop on Coast Guard and Navy signals – a constant background chatter. It was only when Fifi pointed out the silence from the radio that he realised he’d heard nothing in over half an hour. Frowning at the bizarre weather up ahead, he hastened back below decks.