Read Online Zodiac by Neal Stephenson - Free Book Online Page B

Antarctica, established a beachhead on the Siberian coast. They could do
anything
, and they would if I told them to; but I’d rather they enjoyed the gig.
    â€œThese people here are environmental virgins,” I said. We were sitting around on deck, eating tofu-and-nopales omelets. It was a warm, calm, Jersey summer night and the sky was starting to lose its darkness and take on a navy-blue glow. “They think toxic waste happens in other places. They’re shocked about Bhopal and Times Beach, but it’s just beginning to dawn on them that they might have a problem here. The Swiss Bastards are sitting fat and happy on that ignorance. We’re going to come in and splatter them all over the map.”
    Crew members exchanged somber glances and shook their heads. These people were seriously into their nonviolence and refused to take pleasure in my use of the word “splatter.”
    â€œOkay, I’m sorry. That’s going a little far. The point is that this is a company town. Everybody works at that chemical factory. They like having jobs. It’s not like Buffalo where everyone hates the chemical companies to begin with. We have to establish credibility here.”
    â€œWell, I forgot to bring my three-piece suit, man,” said one of the antisplatter faction.
    â€œThat’s okay. I brought mine.” I do, in fact, have a nice three-piece suit that I always wear in combination with a dead-fish tie and a pair of green sneakers splattered with toxic wastes. It’s always a big hit, especially at GEE fundraisers and in those explosively tense corporate boardrooms. “They’re expecting, basically, people who looklike you.” I pointed to the hairiest of the
Blowfish
crew. “And they’re expecting us to act like flakes and whine a lot. So we have to act before we whine. We can’t give them an excuse to pass us off as duck squeezers.”
    There was a certain amount of passive-aggressive glaring directed my way; I was asking these people to reverse their normal approach. But I was directing this gig and they’d do what I asked.
    â€œAs usual, if you don’t like the plan, you can just hang out, or go into town or whatever. But I’ll need as many enthusiasts as I can get for this one.”
    â€œI’m into it,” said a voice from the galley. It was Arty, short for Artemis, author of the omelets, the best Zodiac jockey in the organization. Naturally she was into it; it was a Zodiac-heavy operation, it was exciting, it was commandolike. Artemis was even younger than me, and military precision didn’t come with all the emotional baggage for her that it did for the middle-aged
Blowfish
crew.
    At 4:00 A.M ., Artemis powered up her favorite Zode and prominently roared off, heading for some dim lights about half a mile away. The lights belonged to a twenty-foot coast guard boat that was assigned to keep an eye on us. It happens that boats of that size don’t have cooking facilities, so Artemis had whipped up a couple of extra omelets, put them in a cooler to keep them warm and was headed out to give these guys breakfast. She took off flashing, glowing and smoking like a UFO, and within a couple of minutes we could hear her greeting the coast guards with an enthusiasm that was obscene at that time of the morning. They greeted her right back. They knew one another from previous
Blowfish
missions, and she liked to flirt with them over the radio. To them she was a legend, like a mermaid.
    That was when Tom and I took off in one of the other Zodes. This one had a small, well-muffled engine, and we’d stripped off all the orange tape and anything else that was easy to see in the dark.
    The
Blowfish
was three miles off the coast and maybe five miles south of the toxic site that had just been locked up by Debbie andTanya. Jim waited fifteen minutes, so the coast guards could eat and we could slip away, then cranked up the
Blowfish
’s huge