These idiots were just as happy to spend Australian dollars, Korean won and Japanese yen, all of which were changing hands around her, as they were American newbies. A couple of happy sailors, who looked too young to be wearing the uniform, slipped past her with a much-prized PlayStation 3. The stupid toy probably cost those sailors their combined pay for the last six months, and now they’d have to start saving for the games. Whatever happened to blowing your money on hookers and tattoos? She shook her head as she threaded through a kerbside shiatsu parlour – three massage tables, all occupied, just dropped into the crush of foot traffic like stones in a river.

Jules stopped outside a noodle house to reorient herself, needing to make sure she was still headed towards the cigar stand Shah said the Rhino used. She’d had no luck at the marina earlier, and was now working her way through a list of his haunts. She remembered, on their long run out of New York, that the old chief had talked about signing up for another hitch himself. Aged fifty-two, he was still relatively young, and twenty years in the Coast Guard would count in his favour with the Navy. But of course, even if he did make it in, he might well end up on some old tub, trawling up and down the Atlantic coast running anti-piracy patrols, instead of serving on board something like the Bataan. There’d be retraining, and he’d have to serve the needs of the US Navy, not the other way around. He wouldn’t even get his former Coast Guard rank back – be lucky to get petty officer third-class, in fact. All of that rubbish plus zero desire on his part to find himself back on the East Coast anytime soon had swiftly put an end to thoughts of re-enlistment. Like her, the Rhino’s main desire after the clusterfuck in Manhattan was a quiet life.

He’d broken the news at the bar of the Idler, shortly after they’d sailed ‘the lake’ yet again, leaving the US for good, landing in Sydney, hoping that Cesky had no pull so far away from Seattle.

‘Best bet for this particular megafaunal rarity is to stay hunkered the fuck down, as low as my massive horn will permit, Miss Jules. And I hunker best on my lonesome.’

Thus, while she’d tried to blend into the cashed-up refugee scene in Sydney, paying her way with a few salvaged trinkets, he’d fetched up in Darwin, the northernmost city of Australia, at the arse end of the world; a weird, frontier boom town that had doubled in size, doubled again, then doubled again in the years since 2003. Military and civilian alike, tens of thousands of the Rhino’s fellow Americans had come here, drifting down – or sometimes running headlong – from the chaos that swept through Asia after the Disappearance.