Towing Jehovah (37 page)

"Nobody," said Katsakos.

"Not you?"

"No, sir."

"Not Peche?"

"No."

"Then I'll fire it."

"I
insist
we turn around!" seethed Di Luca.

"Mr. Katsakos, I'm putting you in charge," said the captain, starting away. "Alter course as the situation requires, whatever gives me a clear shot at the tow chains—they're only targeting the
Val
so the body'll go down with her!"

Neil looked south. Two Crotales were flying across God's nose toward the maneuvering dive bombers. The warheads exploded simultaneously, hitting the echelon leader and the next plane in line an instant after their pilots and gunners bailed out. Trailing black oil, the first Dauntless crashed into the chin, shattering the encrusted ice and igniting the beard. Wingless, the second plane became a flaming sphere, roaring through the sky and falling into God's left eye like a cinder.

Neil focused on the beard, each whisker enveloped by a high, slender flame coiling around its shaft. He lowered his gaze. Christopher Van Horne stood on the fo'c'sle deck, his mountainous form hunched over the starboard Phalanx, his purple parka rippling in the Arctic wind.

"Steady," said Katsakos from the control console.

"Steady," echoed Neil.

As the blood spill splashed against the
Maracaibo
's prow, her captain swerved the gun and aimed. A sudden puff of smoke appeared, haloing the muzzle. Fifty yards from the
Valparaíso,
a fountain of seawater shot into the air, dead center between the chains.

"Left ten," muttered Katsakos.

"Left ten."

Van Horne fired again. This time the shell hit home, turning the central link into a silvery flash of pulverized metal. As the chain flew apart, the segment nearer the cranium slithered into the ocean while its stubby counterpart swung toward the stern, clanging against the hull.

"Nice shooting, Captain!" cried the excited mate.

"Steady!"

"Steady," said Neil.

"Dive bombers at twelve o'clock!" screamed Katsakos.

Another shell flew from the starboard Phalanx, disintegrating a link and neatly separating the
Val
from her cargo. Whether or not Christopher Van Horne saw the fruits of his marksmanship was unclear, for the instant the chain broke, a Dauntless dropped its payload barely fifty feet from the captain. The bomb detonated. Cannon, hatches, icicles, and chunks of bulwark sailed heavenward, borne on a pillar of fire. Within seconds the entire fo'c'sle was burning, gouts of black smoke swirling above the fractured deck like rain clouds poised to release India ink.

"No!" shrieked Katsakos.

"Holy shit!" groaned Neil.

"I
told
him to turn around!" sputtered Di Luca.

Flawlessly, the
Maracaibo's
firefighting system sprang to life.

As the klaxon brayed across the Norwegian Sea, a dozen robot hoses appeared, rising from the bulwarks like moray eels slithering out of their lairs. Jets of frothy white foam shot from the nozzles.

"Oh, Christ!" screamed Katsakos as the flames gasped and died. "Oh, Lord!" he wailed. The foam subsided like an outgoing tide, leaving behind a mass of melted pipework and the fallen body of Christopher Van Horne. "Oh, God, they blew up the captain!"

When the
Maracaibo
went to war against Air Group Six, incinerating her torpedo planes and dive bombers with deadly guided missiles, the focus of Oliver's terror shifted from Cassie to himself. He was not embarrassed. It was Cassandra, in fact, who liked to dismiss so-called heroism as but one step removed from theistic self-delusion, and besides, at the moment his own peril clearly outclassed hers, the
Maracaibo
being likely to interpret Strawberry Eleven as yet another hostile plane and attack accordingly.

True, the Gulf tanker had just sustained a direct hit from a 500-pound demolition bomb. But instead of touching off either the tanker's cargo oil or her bunker fuel, the explosion had merely ignited her fo'c'sle deck—a localized conflagration soon brought under control by automated foam throwers—and before long she was enthusiastically targeting the two armed Devastators and three armed Dauntlesses remaining in the air.

"I can't stand this!" shouted Oliver.

"Scared, are you?" asked Flume, who did not himself seem particularly happy.

"You bet I'm scared!"

"Don't be ashamed if your bowels let go," said Pembroke, likewise distraught. "During World War Two, almost a quarter of all infantrymen lost that kind of control in battle."

"At least, that's how many admitted to it," added Flume, nervously winding his headset cord around his wrist. "The actual percentage was probably higher."

Tow chains severed, the
Valparaíso
listed badly to starboard. Blood pooled along her hull. Even if she began to founder, Oliver reasoned, there'd be plenty of time for Cassie and her shipmates to get away in lifeboats—whereas if the
Maracaibo
opened fire on Strawberry Eleven, her crew and passengers would all, most probably, die.

"Van Horne must've been trimmin' her with blood," said Reid over the intercom. "Good way to lighten his load—right, Mr. Flume?"

Flume made no reply. His partner remained equally silent. As the
Maracaibo
took on the remnants of Air Group Six, the war reenactors sat rigidly in their machine-gun blisters and listened to the transceiver broadcasts, a radio horror show to put their beloved
Inner Sanctum
to shame.

"Missile at six o'clock!"

"Mayday! Mayday!"

"Bail out, everybody!"

"Help me!"

"Jump!"

"Shit!"

"Mommy! Mommy!"

"This isn't in my contract!"

Oliver felt like praying, but it was impossible to gather the requisite energy when the decayed, frozen, violated remains of the God he didn't believe in stretched so starkly before his eyes.

"Alby?"

"Yeah, Sid?"

"Alby, I'm not having any fun."

"I know what you mean."

"Alby, I want to go home."

"Ensign Reid," said Flume into his intercom mike, "kindly climb to nine thousand feet and set off for Point Luck."

"You mean—withdraw?"

"Withdraw."

"Ever walk out on one of your own shows before?" asked Reid.

"Just leave, Jack."

"Roger," said the pilot, pulling back on the control yoke.

"Alby?"

"Yeah, Sid?"

"Two of our actors are dead."

"Most of 'em bailed out."

"Two are dead."

"I know."

"Waldron's dead," said Pembroke. "His gunner too, Ensign Collins."

"Carny Otis, right?" said Flume. "I saw him at the Helen Hayes once. Iago."

"Alby, I think we done bad."

"Attention, Torpedo Six!" came Ray Spruance's portrayer's voice from the transceiver. "Attention, Scout Bombing Six! Listen, men, no matter how you slice it, we aren't being paid to mess with a Gulf tanker!

Break off the attack and return to
Enterprise!
Repeat: break off attack and return! We weigh anchor at 1530 hours!"

From out of nowhere a crippled dive bomber arrived, sheets of flame flowing from her wings. The plane zoomed so close that Oliver could see the pilot's face—or, rather, he would have seen the pilot's face had it not been burned clear to the bone.

"It's Ensign Gay!" cried Pembroke. "They got Ensign Gay!"

"Please, God, no!" shouted Flume.

The runaway Dauntless headed straight for the flying boat's tail, shedding sparks and firebrands. Pembroke shrieked madly, moving his hands back and forth as if pantomiming a frenetic game of cat's cradle. Then, as Strawberry Eleven reached nine thousand feet, the bomber collided with her, snapping off the PBY's rudder, severing her starboard stabilizer, puncturing her fuselage, and pouring burning gasoline into the tunnel gunner's compartment, each individual disaster unfolding so rapidly that Oliver's single scream sufficed to cover them all. A mass of flames swept along the aft flooring and into the portside blister. Searing heat filled the cabin. Within seconds, Albert Flume's cotton trousers, aviator's
scarf,
and flak jacket were ablaze.

"Aaaiiii!"

"Alby!"

"Put me out!"

"Put him out!"

"God, put me out!"

"Here!" Charles Eaton's portrayer shoved a glossy red cylinder into Oliver's lap.

"What's this?" Oliver couldn't tell whether the tears flooding his eyes sprang from terror, pity, or the black smoke wafting through the mechanic's station. "What? What?"

"Read the directions!"

"Oh, Jesus!" screamed Flume. "Oh, sweet Jesus!"

"I think we lost our tail!" cried Reid over the intercom.

Oliver wiped his eyes. HOLD UPRIGHT. He did. PULL PIN. Pin? What pin? He made a series of desperate grabs—please, God, please,
the pin
—and suddenly he was indeed gripping something that looked like a pin.

"Put me out!"

"Put him out! Oh, Alby, buddy!"

STAND BACK 10 FEET AND AIM AT BASE OF FIRE. Oliver Seized the discharge hose and pointed it toward Flume. "We lost our tail!" "Put me out!" SQUEEZE LEVER AND SWEEP SIDE TO

SIDE. A thick gray mist gushed from the horn, coating the war reenactor in foul-smelling chemicals and instantly smothering the flames.

"It's gonna hurt!" groaned Flume as the PBY careened crazily, dropping toward the ocean. "It's really gonna hurt!"

"No tail!"

"Give me pants that
entrance!
It's starting to hurt!"

Tearing off his headset, Oliver crawled past Flume's smoking, writhing form, lurched into the tunnel gunner's compartment, and began attacking the flames.

"Why does God permit this?" asked Pembroke of no one in particular.

"Shoulders Gibraltar, shiny as a halter!" screamed Flume, writhing in agony. "Oh, Jesus, it hurts! It hurts so much!"

Everyone tried to be polite.

Everyone struggled to avoid the subject.

But in the end Albert Flume's situation could not be denied, and right before Strawberry Eleven belly flopped into the Norwegian Sea, splitting into a dozen pieces, Pembroke turned to his best friend and said, in a soft, sad voice, "Alby, buddy, you don't have any arms."
Father

BY A MIRACLE OF the sort that in an earlier age Jehovah Himself might have wrought, the
Valparaíso
stayed afloat that afternoon, allowing the officers, crew, and rescued war reenactors to abandon her in an orderly fashion. There was even time to salvage certain crucial items: footlockers, musical instruments, fillets of Corpus Dei, a few jars of glory grease, some supervegetables from Follingsbee's garden, the
Ten Commandments
print. The
Valparaíso
was terminal, of course. Anthony knew it. A captain could always tell. No ingenious patching job or heroic pumping effort could save her. But what a fighter, he thought, what a tough old lady, ceding fewer than ten feet per hour to the bloodstained Norwegian Sea. By noon her weather deck lay completely buried, but her superstructure was still visible, rising out of the waves like a hotel perched on pylons.

At 1420, Anthony began ferrying the final group over the red ocean to the
Carpco Maracaibo
—a grim little party consisting of Cassie, Rafferty, O'Connor, Father Ockham, and Sister Miriam, each evacuee clutching a seabag. No one said a word. Cassie refused to look him in the eye. She had much to brood about, he knew, several reasons to be sad: the failure of her plot, the crash landing of her boyfriend's plane, the deaths of John Waldron and two other mercenaries. Were Anthony not himself benumbed and despondent, he might have actually felt sorry for her.

He parked the
Juan Fernandez
beside a vulcanized rubber dock tied to the
Maracaibo'
s hull, waited until everyone had disembarked, then cast off.

"Where're you going?" Rafferty called after him.

"I forgot my sextant."

"Christ, Anthony—I'll buy you a sextant in New York!"

"My sister gave it to me!" he shouted toward the fading figures on the dock. By 1445 Anthony was back at the wreck site, maneuvering the
Juan Fernandez
alongside a first-floor window. He smashed the glass with the launch's stockless anchor and climbed over the sill. The elevator had shorted out, so he used the companionways instead. Reaching level seven, he entered the chart room, locked the door, and waited.

Brain lost.

Body lost.

Val
lost.

There was no choice, really. He'd blown the mission. His second chance was gone. He stared at the Formica table. The jumbled maps tormented him. Sulawesi, redolent of Cassie's midriff. Pago Pago, so evocative of her breasts. He lifted his gaze. Forward wall, the Mediterranean; aft wall, the Indian Ocean; port wall, the South Pacific; starboard wall, the North Atlantic. He was giving up so much, all these glorious tracts of sea and patches of shore, most of them despoiled and ravaged by the reigning species, yet all still painfully beautiful at the core. Let no man say Anthony Van Horne did not know what he was losing.

His migraine awoke. In a corner of the aura, an oiled egret rose from the chart of Matagorda Bay and flapped its matted wings. Seconds later, a pilot whale, glossy with Texas crude, wriggled out of the same poisoned sea, flopped onto the floor, and died. How would the end come? Would the ocean pour into the chart room and drown him? Or was the door sufficiently watertight that he would survive the descent into the Mohns Trench, only to perish when the impossible pressures hit the superstructure, crushing it like an egg under a jackboot?

A loud knock. Then four, rat-a-tat-tat. Anthony ignored them. His visitor persisted.

"Yeah?"

"It's Thomas. Open up."

“Get away!”

"Suicide's a sin, Anthony."

"In whose eyes? His? They went to jelly two weeks ago."

At least one of the losing admirals at Midway, he recalled, had done the honorable thing. Anthony hungered for the details. Had the poor defeated Jap chained himself to the helm? Had he changed his mind at the last minute but died anyway because nobody was around to unlock the manacle?