‘Good-o, then,’ said Jules. ‘Mr Shah, if you would like to work out the precise figures, we shall draw up a contract today. I’d like to get some of your men out to the yacht as soon as possible, but I will need two of you here with me over the next couple of days as we take on crew.’

Shah grunted in affirmation and, she was sure, nearly saluted her. ‘Corporal Birendra will take Subba and Sharma out to the vessel. I will remain with Thapa and you.’

‘Okay,’ said Jules, still unsure who was who, other than Shah and possibly Birendra. She did note the use of the military rank, too. ‘I imagine you fellows will have personal effects you want to pick up. And I suppose there’s a bill for your accommodation to be worked out?’

‘Yes and no,’ replied Shah. ‘We have personal items to gather. For the last week, however, we have provided security to our hotel in return for lodging. No bill.’

And soon after you’re gone, no hotel, Jules thought to herself. ‘Just one other thing, Mr Shah – or would you prefer “Sergeant”?’

‘That is your choice, Miss.’

‘Okay then. Your men here – I’m sorry to have to ask, and I mean no disrespect – but do they all speak good English? It’s just that it could be an issue in a tight spot, couldn’t it?’

Shah’s face split open into a wide grin. ‘The Queen’s English, ma’am. With a touch of sarf London, from the instructor in their barracks.’

‘All right,’ Jules smiled. ‘That will do fine. If you would like to detail a small party to pick up your gear from the hotel, I’ll draft up some papers for you to check and sign if acceptable. Then I’ll need your help transferring those stores behind you to my boat. We’ll run out to the yacht, you can meet the others, secure the ship, and then you and I and Mr… Thapa, was it? – we’ll get back on shore and round up some reliable crew.’

Shah indicated his agreement but he had one more question. ‘Do we have a destination, Miss?’

‘Please, “Jules” will be fine. And no, I have no idea where we are headed initially. Just the hell away from here and that bloody wave.’

It was late before they returned to port. Shah’s men loaded the cruiser in less than an hour, but motoring to and from the Aussie Rules was a nine-hour round trip. For now the marina’s own security staff, boosted by some freelance heavies, were more than up to the task of securing her boat and the small dockside lockup against any looters, but that wouldn’t always be the case. She was quietly relieved when Thapa took up watch on the 42-footer, while she and Mr Shah plotted out their next move.

It was coming up on ten at night, and the dock was well lit, courtesy of a diesel-fired generator she could hear droning away in the distance. Incredibly, she could also hear music, laughter and the tinkle of glasses drifting across from the more expensive berths, where a large number of luxury yachts were docked, one of them as big as her own. Apparently the owners and their guests had enough money and muscle to convince themselves they could remain unaffected by events outside the marina. Not all of the berths were occupied, however. Jules calculated that a third were empty, the boats that normally filled them having lit out already. But of those who had stayed, it seemed most were intent on pretending they could hold back reality with good cheer and hired guns.

Acapulco proper, though, was a patchwork of light and dark. From the flying deck of the cruiser, parts of the city looked entirely normal. Lights twinkled in houses and apartments, traffic streamed along the waterfront, and throngs of people were visible through the big pair of Zeiss binoculars she’d brought back from the Rules. Elsewhere, chaos reigned. Buildings burned and the pop and crackle of gunfire was constant. Sirens had wailed through the first few nights, but they were becoming less frequent. In fact, Jules couldn’t recall the last time she’d noticed one. She poured three cups of coffee and silently thanked God that the thick blanket of toxic waste released by the burning of hundreds of empty American cities had drifted east, and not south. She was convinced this place would be falling apart a lot more quickly if a nuclear winter had descended as it had in Europe.

‘Thapa, come get your brew,’ barked Shah, as he handed a steaming mug down to the heavily armed rifleman on the deck below. Thapa took his drink with a grateful bow of the head and a smile for Jules, making her feel much better about having to hire and trust so many strangers with guns.

She couldn’t help wondering how Pete would have played all this. Badly, she guessed, given that his first thought had been to team up with Shoeless Dan, just a couple of hours before Dan had attacked and killed him. She still missed the old fool, though. They’d been good friends, even if Pete had just a little too much of the surf bum about him to trust in a situation like this. He took his business seriously, and he was a smart bloke who’d played the odds as well as anyone she knew of. But in the end he was like so many Australians she’d met – ultimately prone to falling back on a naive, almost childish belief that everything would work out for the best.

Nothing in Julianne Balwyn’s life led her to believe that. To an outsider, to someone like Shah, for instance, she must surely have appeared as just one more rich oik, the lucky child of old landed gentry, wasting the advantages of the best schools, an ancient title, and a thousand years of hereditary privilege. For Jules, however, her old life was an anxious, contingent affair, where the pressure to maintain appearances was grossly aggravated by the manifest inadequacies of two parents whose laziness and selfishness were exceeded only by their sense of entitlement. She was well rid of all that bullshit.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘We’re not going to need bartenders or butlers, but looking over the old crew manifest, we will easily need more than a dozen warm bods to run the engine room, the bridge, the IT systems, and do general deck duties. Probably be an idea to have a ship’s doctor too, if we can find one. A proper helmsman who could handle the tub in a bad blow. A navigator for when the GPS goes down… I mean, where does it end? How do I pay them all?’

Shah swallowed his coffee in one long draw. ‘You don’t,’ he replied with a single, emphatic shake of the head. ‘They pay you.’

‘Beg your pardon?’ Jules was perplexed, but intrigued.

In reply her new security chief held up the empty mug. ‘This coffee, Miss Julianne, it came from your own stores. But if you had bought it here today, on shore it would have cost you twenty-five euros.’

That caused a raised eyebrow, but on reflection it shouldn’t have. She already knew that raging inflation and currency collapse had reduced the worth of the greenbacks they’d stowed away in the Diamantina to a fraction of their face value. That’s why she’d got rid of them so quickly. The small office and waterfront store she’d rented here for five days had cost fifty thousand US dollars upfront. Now it would probably be a six-figure sum, but she was a lot more sanguine about that than she had been a week earlier. As soon as they’d hit port she’d moved to unload most of the cash as quickly as possible, and had managed to get forty cents on the dollar, taken in the form of fuel, stores, gold, medicine and arms, most of it now safely aboard the Aussie Rules.