Disclaimer: Disclaimed!
This is the sequel to Big Wings, but it ought to stand on its own, anyway.
Just before our story begins, Jack Sparrow stole back Tonga Mars, the giant flying boat that pillaged the East Indies in the 1960's and 70's, with the help of a greedy med-school applicant named Kyle.
As in all the Age of the Uzi stories, they found the Fountain of Youth, which, disappointingly, doesn't make people immortal.
Oh, Canada
Where Royal Mounties can arrest me.
The present day. Vancouver.
Jack Sparrow had a ship. He did not have a crew.
Oh, he had one crewman, the lanky young sawbones Kyle Warner, and his ship was actually more of an airplane, what with its two wings, its four radial engines, and its helpful habit of leaping thousands of miles over hills and forests through the open sky, but Tonga Mars was wet enough to be a ship, and he'd sooner take Barbossa's cursed monkey to Malacca than Kyle Warner. The boy was trouble.
That morning they had left the great black ship sleeping on a secluded lake in the Canadian woods, shivered on the side of the road before thumbing a ride from a young man in an orange pickup, and were currently cruising down quiet back-roads lined with dripping pines, toward Vancouver, in search of certain tavern. The tavern belonged to an old acquaintance, who ought to have rounded up a dozen sane or docile criminals eager to leave North America for a life of travel, debauchery, and excess usually reserved for rock stars.
When Sparrow spotted the bar, he told the pimply driver to stop, got out of the little cab, and hauled a shivering Kyle to his feet and out of the open truck bed.
"After you," said Jack cheerily, waving toward the door and the shimmering blue mosquito lamp. Kyle, wiping his nose dry on his sleeve, hunched and clasped his numbed hands under his armpits. He felt extremely uneasy about turning his back to a man he had recently strangled with a drawstring, but he supposed that was the point. Looking over the building before him, he cringed.
If there was a god of apathy, his favorite temple would be a backwoods tavern called Jules' Hole. The dark brown paint peeled away from silvery wood panels, the steep steel roof wore streaks of rust like gravy stains, the neon Budweiser sign in the window was half dead, the TV had passed its fifteenth birthday after four years of grainy hockey games and snow-washed news. Unkempt shrubs screened the back lot from the road. Jules' Hole was the only place an outlaw biker and two rival triad men could sit at the same table and watch the game over a brace of warm beers—the lowlifes who drank there simply did not care who shared the bar, so long as they kept to themselves.
The enforcement for the torpor that shrouded the Hole was partly its repellant shabbiness, and partly Jules' obsessive, almost preternatural vigilance against anyone who cared enough to make trouble.
Jules was a somber, slouching man, rail-thin but for a small pot-belly, bald but for a little gray tonsure around the back of his head. One foot always dragged as he stumped around behind the bar. When a newcomer walked in, Jules would squint at them as though he needed glasses but had never bothered with an optometrist, then, on some mysterious judgment, either ask their preference or show them right back out the door. The shotgun behind the counter was not for show.
The regulars liked Jules. He kept things quiet and minded his own business. He had been a crook like them, in another life, and he was always good for a story, given a little prodding. When Jules reminisced about his wild youth, he was different than other washed-up old men: he had a hunger about him, a mad hope that filtered through.
If Kyle and Sparrow had arrived a week and two hours earlier, they would have heard Jules casually telling a knot of newcomers how he had hurt his leg.
"So Jim said, where we gonna get a helicopter in Zhanjiang?" Jules spoke quietly, soft enough to hear the game over, as he leaned on the bar and wiped glasses with a yellowish rag.
"And then Mitty said, Mat Russia this and that, we could fly Tonga up to Vladivostok and grab a helicopter. And Gung Ngau said sure, we could grab one, but could we fly it? And then we all looked at the captain, could he fly it, and he kind of shrugged us off like he usually did and said something about dogs and a piece of meat and a lifeboat, can't really remember, except that he meant if we landed the chopper near the prison, all the Chinese ladies would try to pile on and hang by the skids or something, and we'd never get back off the ground.
"Now he was in a bit of a mood, since we'd practically striked him into helping us once we heard about the arrest, but we couldn't just leave Hiu's grandma locked up in the Laogai. She'd make the whole crew dumplings whenever we docked in town, see, and Hiu was a sweet kid."
1971, T minus sixteen days. A teahouse near Zhanjiang, Guangdong Province, People's Republic of China.
Madam Zham had gotten herself pinched. Nabbed. Delivered an undeclinable invitation to the reeducation camp. Locked up. The Reds didn't appreciate her flexible view of the law and her unstable political leanings.
This was unfortunate for the crew of the Tonga because the feisty widow was called "Madam" for a reason, and it wasn't a very polite one. She might not have run a cathouse herself, but she always knew where the boys could have a good time: the government frowned on it, but like many things in China, it was there for those who knew who to ask. She dealt in banned books under the table—always a risky, but lucrative business in a dictatorship—so the crew could get a bit for their old science fiction novels, poetry books, and nude magazines. Her son, a "procurement officer," or village fence, would usually come up with a bundle of yuan or a month's provisions for any bolts, screws, coffee, cigarettes, or whatever else the Tonga had happened to plunder. And her spring dumplings were heavenly.
Her arrest was unfortunate for Jack Sparrow because his crew was unhappy, doubly unfortunate because they were convinced that they, meaning Jack, could do something to put things right: the price of his unearthly cunning and magnificent leadership skill.
Jack had found himself with a quandary. If any ship could ever become half the shadow of what the Black Pearl had been, it was Tonga Mars. He wasn't ready to abandon the plane just yet, and certainly didn't want to compete with her as an enemy in the future, so he had bowed to the crew's demands, and now found himself in a scruffy teahouse filled with policemen.
He regretted handling reconnaissance himself.
It had been a few years—more than a few, perhaps a decade—since he had last ventured any further into New China than Hiu's tiny, isolated village set on brackish ground and largely ignored by government collectors. This teahouse was in the city, filled with weary respectable town fathers and flat-faced police—they were all flat-faced, he noticed, wearing a rigid half-smile that concealed and stifled like a mask, and they were all uniformed: the police in rumpled green short-collared jackets with belts, and the businessmen in head-to-toe black to imitate the dress of Party-members. It was as though he had wandered onto a parade ground, not a watering hole.
Twenty pairs of eyebrows lifted in cautious surprise as the door swung closed behind him, and the four nearest policemen got to their feet.
Jack bowed his little bow and backed right out the way he came.
He heard footsteps as he dodged into the teahouse's alley. It was barely wide enough for a dog to get through, much less a pirate, but Jack squeezed, glancing to the side and seeing a green-shirted policeman staring at him and hollering. He scraped his face against the wood to look the other way, still hop-shuffling sideways, and saw another policeman slide into place. He was bottled in—it was about as roomy as an actual bottle, come to think of it.
Never to be discouraged, and cursing freely, Jack pinned his elbows into the gap, hitched his knees off the ground to plant his feet on the wall, and began to wriggle upward.
The policemen were squeezing their own way into the alley. Jack wriggled faster, worming toward the eaves overhead, until he felt a tug on his boot. He heaved himself up another six inches and kicked, smashing the policeman's hand against the wall, until the other policeman grabbed his other boot, and Jack found himself dangling painfully by his shoulders and elbows. Looking down, he kicked the man on the left in the nose, freed that leg, and grunted and scrambled up, hitching himself sideways to pull his feet out of their reach.
The man on the right still clung to him like a squat, olive-green remora, and the man with the broken nose staggered up and joined him in hauling Jack down by his boot. Jack twisted out of it, leaving the men to drop against the wall with a reeking slab of leather that had molded perfectly to his foot over its five-year career and the clutter of coins, bits of fishing line, emergency knives, and matches that he stored down there. "You better bloody appreciate that," he snapped in gutter-Cantonese as they chattered back at him. They talked too fast—something about a ladder. Jack reached the top of the roof in front of him, flopped onto it, and seal-crawled his way onto the shingles.
And then he was off, sprinting over ridgelines, leaping alleys wide enough for horsecarts and streets too narrow for pigs, hobbling on one boot with his arms flailing around his head as though clutching for invisible ratlines, losing elevation with every third jump, and constantly scanning for dead ends.
The police were good. There was a baying pack of them running along the ground, and the civilians joined in the chase.
It was as though the whole city had something to prove.
Now that he was up on the roofs, Jack realized as he hit a gable, jumped, bashed his knee on the landing, and rolled to his feet, he was far safer than he would be if he tried to slip down unseen before the crowd caught him. He hopped another gap, a narrow one the length of his arm, and for a blessed ten seconds crossed the roof with the noise falling away behind him, before a shout from below brought the rabble back to his heels. What he needed was a barrier, a wall, a pack of hyenas, a gas explosion, something to put a damper on the citizens while he made his stunning, improbable, and above all, successful escape. He'd settle for hiding in a diaper truck, frankly.
Modernization had patched the classic peaked-roofed buildings with mushrooms of flat-topped concrete, and the first chance he got, Jack hopped onto a line of those new buildings that led towards the river, noticing as he ran that his human hounds now had an advance guard of four-legged hounds, who whined and yapped, heads to the sky, at his every footfall. Smiling like a broad highway or the tracks of trade winds, grubby new concrete box-tenements pointed the way to the river—the river, yes! the little smelly greasy fouled canal of a river, with a lonely power line stretched across for the doves to perch, a power line that seemed to disappear right at the corner of a building near the river's edge, and hang on the other side from higher rooftop.
Only a few more roofs to go. Would he shimmy across, or swing? To swing, he'd have to cut the wires, and slicing cable with a sword without electrocuting himself would be awkward if he could manage at all, so perhaps he would shimmy.
If only they weren't all watching as he inched himself upside down along the wire, Jack thought, glancing down at the knot of people bunched together directly beneath him. But thankfully, they hadn't resorted to guns yet…
Probably because he hadn't done anything wrong.
Down at the fringe of the crowd, a boy and his dog watched a strange man crawl upside-down on a power line, toward the river's edge. The dog barked helplessly, and the boy found himself a fist-sized rock, took aim, and clocked the fugitive on the head, dropping him like an overripe plum, square in the center of the crowd.
Welcome to Communism. I turn every Communist country into the Evil Empire in this story; what can I say, I fear big government.
Sorry to any Communists. And I do mean "sorry."�