Free 2020 by Robert Onopa

his duffel.
    He searched out an empty VNN experience room at the base Officer’s Mess. The tape she’d slipped among his work clothes was the footage they’d shot working on the Swan . Alone in the room, he could feel the pastel sun, smell the salt in the air through the rot from debris, almost touch her as she moved, smiled at the camera, waved, her almond eyes bright with life. And in just a week the Swan had been transformed from a derelict hull into a beautiful creature of the sea.
    He worried about her now, worried too about unfinished odds and ends on the boat, a loose hatchcover, frayed wiring on the inboard. Why had she given him the holotape—unless she intended to sail away later that morning?
    * * *
    At four  A.M. his pager screamed its high-pitched alarm, the sharp sound of grief itself.
    He identified himself to the dispatcher as the Harbors Officer on call with SoCal Red Team.
    Yes, he was responsible for Malibu and the coastline to the south. Yet another harbor fire, he was told, coordinates forthcoming. His heart thudded unnaturally in his chest until he heard that he’d be joining Sergeant Rodriguez in turbocopter four.
    Then he felt relieved.
    Rodriguez worked the San Diego sector exclusively, two hundred clicks south of Long Beach. He never shared Stringer’s territory. So if the Army team was going to be led by Rodriguez, they’d be headed down toward the border, to Encinitas or San Diego itself. As for another fire . . . statistically, it was overdue.
    They put him on a jump jet and he caught the turbocopter at Malibu base, out at the end of the breakwater, just as he had a week before. The actual sight of Rodriguez, plump and muttering to himself as usual, was comforting. Voorst tried to sleep; he’d been able to doze on the jump jet, dreamed a dream of the Swan more vivid than the experience he’d had in the VNN room. But now he couldn’t get it back.
    Rodriguez shook him awake only minutes out of Malibu.
    The column of black smoke was visible from ten clicks away, dense and billowy, shifting in the morning wind like a dye marker in ocean currents.
    Photochemical colors in the sunrise sky: mauve and filthy pink. The old Army turbocopter rattled through the airspace above coastal L.A. descending gradually toward the source of the smoke.
    “Hey, where we goin’?” Voorst asked Rodriguez.
    “Look for y’self. Long Beach. Don’ you guys ever know nothin’?”
    “What do you mean, Long Beach. That’s Stringer’s territory. What would you be doin’ going to Long Beach? Where’s Stringer?”
    “Stringer, the guy’s totally fucked and gone, man,” Rodriguez laughed against the noise.
    Voorst swung up to the open door of the copter’s cargo area, one hand on a safety strap, squinting south through the haze at the string of makeshift harbors, the thousands of houseboats and makeshift live-aboards. Now he could see the black cloud rising from Long Beach Harbor all right, from a broad sector of the main channel. A huge vessel was blocking the harbor mouth. The QE III was bow down, sinking.
    “Jesus. What about Stringer. What do you mean?”
    “Jus’ look at this,” Rodriguez laughed on, punching up a secondary mode on the copter’s VNN summary screen. “ ’S a replay, eight minutes worth. Pix turned up on VNN real-time two hours ago, nobody sayin’ how. Jus’ look at the asshole.”
    The first shaky images showed Stringer in a skiff towing a commando float loaded with cases of Lydex.
    Someone must have fed illegal footage into the VNN broadcast loop. It was an exposé.
    The grainy night shot showed Stringer with his own hands using magnetic grapples to secure the massive charge to rusty plates behind the man-thick anchor chain hanging from the bow of a massive ship. A blue hull. The QE III.
    Stringer dumped fuel from the skiff. Then he fended off, igniting the pilot fire of petrochemicals, turning finally, shock and recognition in his eyes as he saw the camera, the side of