The rollers grew higher, foaming golden and wine. A quarter mile beyond the bow, had he ever turned to look ahead, a nasty cross-chop was developing, the net of jewel-flecked waves spurting high at the knots.
Bagong Bung, tiny beside his big Australian engineer, watched the rust-holed, weed-festooned stack rise by visible stages from the sparkling water fifty yards beyond the bow of the “Machan Lumpur” as the Wanderer set over Vietnam and the sun rose over Hainan.
A lively current strained at the lacy stack and foamed through its holes and tugged at the “Machan Lumpur,” too, so that the tiny steamer had to keep her screw turning just to hold her position, as the Gulf of Tonkin went on emptying into the South China Sea.
A low sonorous sound came from the south, like a very distant jet boom. The two men on the “Machan Lumpur” barely noted it. They had no way of knowing it brought news of the explosion of the volcanic islet of Krakatoa in the Sunda Strait, two and a half hours ago.
And now the colorfully-encrusted bridge of the wreck came into sight, and the current began to slacken. As the full length of the sunken ship became apparent, Bagong hung knew to a certainty it was the “Sumatra Queen.”
Then the little Malay dropped to his knees and bowed west to the Wanderer, and coincidentally to Mecca, and said, softly: “Terima kasi, bogus kuning dan ungu!” Having thanked the yellow and purple miracle-bringer, he rose briskly to his feet and with a playful, lordly wave of his hand cried out gaily: “We will tie up to our treasure ship, oh Cobber-Hume, baik sobat, and board her like kings! At last, my good friend, is the “Machan Lumpur” truly the Tiger of the Mud!”
Sally Harris leaned in the dusk on the balustrade of the penthouse patio and sighed.
To the west the last flames of sunset mingled with those of the oil that had gushed from flood-broken tanks and was now floating and burning on the salt water flooding Jersey City. To the east the Wanderer was rising in its dinosaur face.
“What’s the matter, Sal?” Jake called to her from where he was sipping brandy and chopping away at various cheeses. “Don’t tell me our fire’s started again.”
“Nope, it looks pretty much out. The water’s halfway up and still coming.”
“Is that what’s bothering you?”
“I don’t know, Jake,” she called back listlessly. “I been watching churches going under. I never knew there were so many. Saint Pat’s and Epiphany and Christ and Saint Bartholomew’s and Grace and Actors’ Temple and Saint Mary the Virgin, and Calvary, where they started AA, and All Souls and Saint Mark’s in the Bouwerie and B’nai Jeshurun and The Little Church around the Corner and—”
“Hey, you can’t see all those from there,” Jake protested. “You can’t see half of them.”
“No, but I can see them in my mind.”
“Well, get your mind out of the dumps, then!” he ordered. “Hey look, Sal, our planet’s got King Kong on him and he’s rising over the Empire State Building. How’s that for a crazy gag? Maybe I can work it into the play.”
“I bet you can!” she said, the excitement coming back into her voice. “Hey, have you finished my Noah’s Ark song?”
“Not yet. Jesus, Sal, I got to relax after the fire.”
“You’ve relaxed half a fifth. Get your mind to work.”
Chapter Twenty-six
Doc shouted: “All out, everybody, for a stretch, and to answer Nature’s calls,” forcing a rudely jolly note into his hoarseness. “Wojtowicz, it looks like we’ve finally found the roadblock you deduced.”
The saucer students eagerly yet complainingly piled out into the cool, damp, high air. From almost behind them shone a strange greenish light from the setting sun — the party’s scientific consensus was that it was due to volcanic ash already crowding the stratosphere, though the Ramrod had ideas about planetary auras.
It was very clear they’d been through a lot in the day just ending and that the effects of last night’s lost sleep were showing up with a vengeance…
The yellow paint of the school bus and the white enamel of the panel truck behind it both showed flaring black streaks where they’d barely outraced brush fires. There was a heavy bandage around Clarence Dodd’s right hand, which the Little Man had badly burned holding up a tarpaulin to shield Ray Hanks, Ida and himself from the swooping, sweeping flames.
Hunter cursed as he almost fell out of the bus, stumbling over two spades carelessly left in the aisle after a wearisome two-hour stretch of digging sand and gravel to level a buckled stretch of Monica Mountainway enough for the two cars to get through. He shoved them under the seats with another curse.
Several of the wayfarers looked quite damp, and the black flame marks on bus and truck were runneled by the mighty rain which had come marching across the Santa Monica mountains in steel-gray waves out of the west, ten minutes after they had won their race with the fire. Its great dark curtain-clouds still obscured the east, though the west was clearing spottily.
They were almost twenty miles into the mountains and topping the next to the last ridge before the descent to the Valley, Vandenberg Three, and inland Route 101 leading north from Los Angeles toward Santa Barbara and San Francisco.
There were wet patches on the borrowed raincoat Doc had thrown over his shoulders, with the barest suggestion of a military cape, as he led the others forward, Rama Joan and Margo just behind him.
At this point the Mountainway traversed a half natural, half blasted step in a great slope of solid rock, which from a boulder-crowned summit ridge fifty yards up on their right ran down at an angle of thirty degrees and then, after the step holding the road, continued down at a slightly greater angle for a dozen yards or so and then plunged away precipitously, nothing visible beyond it but the side of another small mountain a half mile off.
The awesome gray rock-slope was patched with lichen, pale green, orange, smoky blue and black, and was scored and gouged with smooth-edged trenches and potholes, some of them holding boulders ranging up to panel-truck size.
One of the biggest of the latter lay squarely across the road, indenting it deeply. A lichen-free area just above showed the spot from which it had been dislodged, presumably by one of the quakes.
“Wow, I’ll say we’ve found the roadblock, Doc,” Wojtowicz called from behind. “She’s a bitch!”
Drawn up sideways just in front of the boulder was a top-down, four-passenger Corvette. Lipstick-red, freshly washed by the rain, it added a saucy touch to the sombre landscape. But there was no one in sight, and Doc’s cheery “Hello there!” was answered only by echoes.
Ida came hurrying up behind Doc, saying: “Mr. Brecht, Ray Hanks isn’t going to be able to take any more traveling today. We’ve propped his shoulders up a bit — it eases him, he says — but he’s in continual pain and has a two-degree fever.”
Doc rounded the red hood, then all of a sudden stopped dead and reared up and back as if invisible grapples had lifted him eight inches by the shoulders. He turned on those behind him a face that looked greener than the sunlight and swept out an arm, saying, “Stay where you are. Don’t anybody come any closer.” He whipped off his raincoat and drew it across something lying just beyond the car.
With a thin, wavery moan Ida quietly collapsed on the asphaltoid.
Then Doc turned to them again, leaning on the car for support and brushing a trembling hand across his forehead, and said in jerky rushes, with difficulty, as if he were fighting down an impulse to retch: “It’s a young woman. She didn’t die naturally. She’d been stripped and tortured. Remember, way back, the Black Dahlia case? It’s like that.”