Shah moved to the railing of the boat’s flying bridge and gestured at the party scenes around the marina. ‘For now, these people are comfortable,’ he said. ‘They have food, shelter, safety, power.’

He turned away and pointed to the brighter, more chaotic nighttime scene of Acapulco central, where uncontrolled fires duelled with neon and fluorescent light to hold back the darkness. ‘Over there,’ he continued, ‘some people are still fine, but many are beginning to suffer and to fear for themselves. Soon, everyone will be afraid. A cup of coffee, a loaf of bread, it could be worth more than your life. People will pay you to get them away from that.’

‘American refugees?’ she pondered aloud. The richest, whitest refugees in the world. It was a bizarre thought, but entirely logical when you considered where events were headed, or indeed where they were right now. ‘Where would we take them? Alaska? Hawaii? The last I heard people were leaving Hawaii, not going there. I don’t think they’re even letting new people in. Same with Seattle, I think. Aid shipments in, flights out, and that’s it.’

Shah moved his shoulder almost imperceptibly. His version of a shrug. ‘If you have English-speaking passengers, take them to an English-speaking port. England, New Zealand, Australia. They are not closed and they will accept refugees, especially with money.’

‘By the time we get there, though, any money they have will be worthless,’ countered Jules.

‘US dollars, certainly,’ he agreed. ‘But yen or pounds or euros – some surviving currency – they will be acceptable. At least to us, in the short term, for the purposes of provisioning. It would help you too, Miss Julianne,’ he added, with a knowing smile.

‘How so?’

‘The yacht is not yours, no? The owner, a famous man, the original passengers and crew, they are gone. But even so, you will need to have some legitimate reason for having taken her over. Ferrying refugees away from danger, especially Americans, to friendly countries – to friendly frightened countries – it could make your passage into any harbour much less difficult. You could be a hero, a rescuer, not a villain and a smuggler.’ His eyes glinted with real humour in the dark.

‘You’re not quite the ramrod-straight, do-it-by-the-book type you first appear, are you, Sergeant?’

‘No good sergeant is, Miss Julianne.’

Jules let her eyes wander over the distant vista of the city as it disintegrated. Long strings of beaded light, the headlights of cars leaving town, wound up into the hills behind the bay. Camp-fires burned here and there, pushing back the blackness, while occasional flashes of light betrayed either cameras or gunfire. A huge blaze had engulfed a high-rise tower, the flames shooting upwards like a giant roman candle, and yet not far away she could see candy-coloured neon and a pair of searchlights, picking out a nightclub where (local rumour had it) you could still dine and drink as though nothing had happened, as long as you could meet the very steep cover charge.

‘Okay,’ she said, making up her mind. ‘Crew first. They work for their passage or they get left behind. We’ll start here, at the marina, by putting out word we’re offering a berth to qualified hands. But you and I might head out tonight, hit the right bars, gather the first of our flock. We can trawl the international hotels tomorrow, looking for passengers.’

‘And where will we offer passage to, Miss Julianne?’

‘Somewhere big and safe and far away. Somewhere the toxic cloud won’t reach. Somewhere that can feed itself. Defend itself, if need be.’

Shah gave her a quizzical look, inviting her to go on. Jules nodded at a framed photograph fixed to the starboard bulkhead. It showed the boat’s previous owner, Greg Norman, teeing off at Royal Sydney.

‘In for a penny, in for a pound. Let’s take his boat back home for him, shall we?’

The scientist droned on, baffling everyone with his impenetrable waffle and jargon-bluster, and in the end it all came to ‘We don’t know shit’.

‘The phenomenon remains non-responsive to magnetic resonance scans,’ said Professor Griffiths. He was a small, round, red-headed toad of a man who’d added yet one more element of misery to Tusk Musso’s existence since his arrival at Gitmo with the National Laboratory team to study the Wave. ‘The precise mechanism by which the phenomenon effects the transubstantiation of certain organic matter to energistic potential remains non-obvious

As he burbled on, the general surreptitiously checked his watch. Griffiths and his eggheads had flown in a few days earlier from Seattle, via Pearl, and Musso remained convinced that Mad Jack Blackstone had facilitated the move as some sort of malicious practical joke. Given the paucity of findings the Nat Lab guys had so far turned up, Griffiths chewed up an enormous amount of Musso’s time and energy with resource requests he simply could not fulfil.

‘Our investigations continue,’ the scientist concluded.

Man, I hope that’s a conclusion, thought Tusk. ‘Any questions?’ asked the Marine, getting to his feet and addressing the room.

Everyone remained unnaturally still. They had learned never to give Griffiths an opening. Ask him how high the Wave went, and you were liable to get a half-hour dissertation on electron orbits.

‘Very good,’ said Musso hurriedly. ‘Bang up presentation there, doc, as always. You keep at it. Get back to us with anything new, of course. But don’t feel the need to interrupt your research otherwise -’

‘Well, about my research, General. This exclusion zone you’ve established along the line of the phenomenon -’

‘Is not open for discussion… Sergeant!’

A Marine Corps gunny rolled up to the podium like an Abrams tank with the throttles thrown wide open. He double-timed Professor Griffiths out of the conference room, closing the door firmly behind them.

Tusk relaxed slightly. He wasn’t being unfair. Everyone had been intrigued and even a little excited when Griffiths had arrived with two pallets full of scientific equipment, but exposure to the man, coupled with a rapid realisation that neither he nor anyone else had yet figured out jack shit about the Wave, tended to dampen that enthusiasm.

He was a five-star pain in the ass.

‘Okay,’ said Musso, with more relief than was seemly. ‘I can see we lost two or three KIA from boredom there. Not a bad result. Ensign Oschin, you got my PowerPoint files ready?’

‘Coming online now, sir.’

‘Thank you, Oschin. Put it straight up.’

General Musso rubbed at a freshly scabbed-over bloodspot on his shaved head. He’d knocked a small divot out of himself fucking around under a desk earlier, fixing up a data cable that’d come loose. His fingers came away with a few tacky spots of blood and he had to pat down the wound with a piece of tissue paper while he waited for the vision from the Global Hawks.