The Darwin Strain

by Bill Schutt

  The clerk’s face brightened. “Certainly, sir!”

  Dmitri Chernov laid down an additional payment for the rooms—a full day and night’s worth, but after no more than ten minutes he gave the clerk a friendly wave and was gone before the sun climbed above the nearest hills. Of course there had been very little out of the ordinary inside, but he was a man used to obtaining evidence where there appeared to be none. He quickly noted how two low dressers had been pulled together forming a sort of table, while a third, moved from another room, he surmised, sat next to the electrical outlet.

  This is where they set up the tape recorder, Dmitri concluded, running a hand over the wooden surface. Glancing down at a few wire shavings, he knew that someone had adapted the device to run on the local current. He wondered what they had heard that was important enough to haul the bulky machine off the surveillance vessel—the scene of an event he did not yet fully comprehend, and one that had ended in the disappearance of more than a dozen countrymen.

  Another makeshift workstation held two desk lamps and a wide cast-iron pan. To an onlooker it might have appeared as if Dmitri had been approaching a bomb or a precariously mounted Fabergé egg. To Dmitri, the positioning of the lamps suggested the arrangement one might have used to illuminate a makeshift surgical procedure, or a microscope. He squatted down and examined the pan from several angles until finally he ran an index finger along the inside.

  Still moist, he had noted.

  He was not in the least surprised to find that his fingertip was tinted red.

  Chapter 8

  All That Remains

  In time’s vastness, ye are bound to me. This act is immutably decreed. It was rehearsed by ye and me, a billion years before this ocean formed.

  —from Ray Bradbury’s screenplay for Moby-Dick

  July 2, 1948

  Santorini

  Wang and Boulle’s Archaeological Site

  Alan emerged from his pup tent to find Yanni preparing coffee at a small camp stove. She maintained her all systems normal mode, as if a Russian ship had not disappeared beneath a too auspiciously timed avalanche. They nodded greetings at one another and Yanni gestured for him to “pull up a rock” and have a seat.

  On the very floor of the old, open-pit mine, their little site was well hidden behind two pillars of volcanic rock and a particularly hardy stand of fig trees. There were no ponds or streams, so the only vegetation in the pit sustained itself with the same deep-penetrating root system that had torn down the late, great city of Angkor. Here the figs seemed to attract all the songbirds from a half mile in any direction.

  Alan sat down on a large black boulder, watching as Yanni went still, taking in all the sounds in silence and wonder. Few places beyond Santorini greeted the day with such beauty, but it was clear to anyone who knew Yanni at all that she was now in a world of her own, seeking out levels of organization within the avian symphony.

  “Find anything interesting?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Yanni said, and did not elaborate. She simply continued listening.

  “So, is it true,” Alan pressed, “that birdsong is mostly distress calls?”

  “It is today,” Yanni answered, and went silent again, searching for, and occasionally finding, hidden rhythmic chords, or phrases. “Something’s wrong,” she announced at last.

  “Something’s always wrong when they bring Mac in,” Alan said, and laughed.

  Yanni nodded and even let out a short laugh of her own.

  “Can I ask you a personal question?” he said, pouring her a cup of coffee.

  “Sure thing, Alan,” she replied, inhaling a scent that always reminded her of Brazil and the home she and Bob had built in the forest. “Don’t tell me you’re thinkin’ of changin’ your name again,” she asked, with mock seriousness.

  Her friend smiled shyly and shook his head. “No, Yanni. I like my new name.”

  “Well, that’s good. I like it too,” she said, and realizing that her mind was beginning to drift, she refocused. “So . . . ask away.”

  “Why are you here?” Alan said, the concern clearly etched on his face. “Why have you come to this dangerous place?”

  Yanni smiled a sad smile and paused before replying. “Mac once told me that if anyone ever asks, ‘Why do you keep getting into trouble like this?’ the worst answer you can give is ‘Because a friend asked me to.’”

  “So that is not what happened?”

  “Sometimes I—I’m still trying to puzzle it out,” Yanni replied, and became distracted again by the birds. The sun was about to crest the eastern hills, and the symphony was ending. “Lemme guess,” she said at last. “You’re thinking that maybe I should have taken his advice, huh?”

  “Well, sometimes Mac is wrong,” Alan replied.

  “Not often,” Yanni said quickly, and tried to stifle another laugh. “But when he is wrong, it’s pretty fucking spectacular.”

  Now it was Alan who chuckled, until his thoughts seemed to wander and his demeanor turned suddenly more pensive.

  Yanni reminded herself that two years ago the “friend now known as Alan” had met them midway into a similarly dangerous expedition, from which they did not come home with as many people as they went in with. And although Alan had never met Jerry Delarosa, she saw to it that he knew the guy as a great and longtime friend of Mac’s. It pained her that whenever Mac uttered the names of the lost, she could detect a poorly hidden tone of self-loathing.

  You’ve got to stop blaming yourself, Yanni had said, time and again. You’ve got to forgive yourself.

  For what?

  For surviving, she had always answered, to no avail.

  “Mac’s lost a lot of people he loved,” she said finally, struggling to find the right words. “He lost his whole family during the war and of course . . . there were other loved ones.”

  Alan nodded knowingly.

  “He’s got no one to go home to, really,” Yanni continued. “And he’s haunted by nightmares that anyone he lets get too close to him, will . . .”

  “Will be next.”

  Yanni let her silence affirm the thought. “And now I think he’s addicted to Hendry’s call to send him somewhere unsafe.”

  “But Yanni, it is clear that he loves you most of all. Why would he . . . why did you—”

  “Because I guess I’ve developed the same addiction,” Yanni said, quietly.

  “I see,” Alan said, the two of them watching as the topic of conversation emerged from his tent.

  “And because Mac is my friend,” Yanni added, shooting Mac a nod, “and he asked me to.”

  Santorini

  Outside the Village of Imerovigli

  Dmitri Chernov stood in the ruins of the medieval capital of Santorini—the once-flourishing and densely populated center now reduced to piles of rock. Constructed during the rise of Spain and Venice and the voyages of Christopher Columbus, the fortress known as Skaros sat atop a stony headland protruding into the eastern Mediterranean. It offered the perfect vantage point from which to provide advance warning for rich Venetians of approaching pirate fleets. But Skaros had suffered a devastating series of earthquakes and fell into disrepair after the population moved gradually to Fira, with its easier accessibility to the sea.

  Chernov had followed a rugged stone path that meandered upward to Skaros Rock, the site of the fortress itself. Strangely nipple-shaped, it rose an impressive two hundred feet and after skirting its base he stopped under a section that offered some shade. The Russian agent glanced down at his watch before removing a pair of field glasses from his backpack. He trained them at a glittering point of light beyond the channel separating the islands of Aspronisi and Therasia. The message had been brief—his brother’s spelling quirks were an added assurance of the sender’s identity, and that no one was holding a gun to him while he signaled. Backup was on the way. He and Alexi would meet up the following day, an hour after sunset, in the shallows off the same deserted patch of wet boulders upon which he had come
ashore.

  He repacked his glasses and started back down the trail. For the first time since his arrival in Greece, Dmitri Chernov smiled.

  After a hearty breakfast, Mac and Yanni paused to admire the immense water-filled caldera—the lagoon now dotted with fishing boats and small craft, sheltered from even the worst storms by a circle of multicolored islands.

  “So, Mac, while you were snoozin’, I took a look at some of the new fossils that Boulle and . . . Alan dug out.”

  “Yeah?” Mac replied, sounding oddly disinterested. He was scanning the horizon through a pair of binoculars.

  “Spectacular skulls,” Yanni said, “and other creatures as well—weird ones.”

  Now Mac put down the binoculars. “This place musta been something else—back in the day. It’s almost a pity we’re stuck here dealing with a fungus that can cure the sick and speed up evolution, huh?”

  “Let’s not forget a chorus of dying Russians and the myth that got ’em dead.”

  Nearby, Pierre Boulle was extracting himself from his own little tent, one of four now clustered between the fig trees and rock pillars that hid their little encampment from prying eyes.

  “Nice of him to stow our belongings,” Mac said, acknowledging the fact that the Frenchman had used his truck to haul away their own gear as well as Cousteau’s diving equipment and the bulky recorder. The section of severed tentacle, which had grown steadily paler since its impressive reanimation, had finally been christened as “either dead or doing a great impersonation of being dead.” Mac was banking on the latter when he decided to preserve it in the Santorini version of white lightning.

  “You think it’s safe?” Yanni asked.

  “If you mean our stuff, then yeah. I think a garage is a more secure place for it than that hotel. Just like this dig site is a safer place for us.”

  “Safer,” Yanni said, ruefully, “but unless we want to spend our time lookin’ for more fossils, we’re not gonna get squat done from here.”

  MacCready picked up the field glasses again and resumed his search of the horizon. “I’d say that kind of research calls for a more secure platform of operation, no?”

  Yanni shot him a patented are you nuts? look. “And what the hell platform are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know, maybe a plane. You wanna take a peek?” he said, handing her the binoculars.

  Yanni grabbed the glasses and followed the line of Mac’s index finger.

  “What do you think?” he said.

  “One of ours, I suppose. But what good’s a plane gonna do us?”

  “It’s a boat too, Yanni—a Catalina, one of the ‘Black Cats.’”

  As they watched, the American seaplane, affectionately known as “the flying Swiss Army knife,” came in low over the lagoon.

  “You think that’s Hendry?” Yanni asked.

  Mac shrugged his shoulders. “Guess we’ll find out.”

  Oddly, the craft suddenly pulled out of its landing approach.

  “Maybe not,” Yanni said, as the Catalina veered away from them. She handed the glasses back to her friend.

  Less than five minutes later, as Mac’s initial excitement transitioned into disbelief, the pilot circled back. This time he appeared to use the darkest section of the red plume as a beacon, landing off the eastern coast of Therasia, several miles from his original line of approach.

  “Isn’t that where—?”

  “You have got to be shitting me,” Mac muttered.

  Yanni shook her head. “So what kind of fool would land a plane in the middle of the red stuff?”

  Though both R. J. MacCready and Yanni Thorne came up with the same name simultaneously, neither of them said it out loud.

  “Yanni, do me a favor and go get Jacques,” Mac said. The seaplane had come to a stop just north of Nea Kameni, the lagoon’s central volcanic wasteland. “We’ve gotta get out there, right now.”

  “Yeah, I was afraid you were going to say that,” she replied.

  Within barely more than twenty minutes, Pierre Boulle was slamming on the brakes of his truck. He sent gravel flying. Mac, Yanni, and Cousteau exited the vehicle as if it were on fire. The small motorboat they’d used previously was gassed up and ready, and after only the most fleeting exchanges of good-luck gestures, the trio was speeding out of a small port south of the quarry.

  “It will take maybe ten minutes to reach the plane,” Cousteau called to his passengers.

  Mac was about to respond when the staccato boom of large-caliber machine gun fire erupted in the distance, the prolonged burst enabling him to easily pinpoint the direction over the sound of their outboard.

  “Make it five, Jacques,” Mac called back, feeling the boat move forward as the Frenchman gunned the throttle.

  At approximately the same time that R. J. MacCready first spotted the seaplane from the ground, one of the two passengers on board the Catalina designated “Street Gang” rose from her window seat. She moved forward, slipping past the navigator’s bench and wireless operator’s station before entering the rear of the cockpit. Without hesitating, she tapped the pilot on the shoulder. His initial surprise quickly morphed into a look that said, Passengers aren’t allowed up here! Then he tried to refocus his attention on safely landing an eleven-ton airplane in a lagoon dotted with small craft.

  “Excuse me,” the woman called loudly, doing so over the considerable roar of twin 900-horsepower engines mounted above and just behind their heads.

  Unable to hide his annoyance any longer, the pilot pulled off his headset and briefly turned to address his passenger. “You really need to take your seat, ma’am!” he shouted.

  The copilot followed up. “And stay strapped in until we pull into the harbor and give you the okay.”

  But instead of departing, the woman simply shook her head, her smile gone. “There’s been a slight change of plans, Captain,” she announced, pointing toward a spot near the center of the lagoon. “I need you to land there,” she said. “Right there. Right now.”

  The pilot followed the path of her finger.

  “Is that clear?”

  The man gave a slight nod, then replaced his headset.

  Moments later the copilot radioed the new information back to the flight engineer, whose compartment was built into a wing spar connected to the fuselage.

  With nothing further to say, Dr. Nora Nesbitt turned and headed back to her seat.

  Squeezing past the man who had been sitting beside her for the past eight hours, she sat down and resecured her seat belt.

  “No sense wasting time,” Nesbitt said, mostly to herself. She could feel the plane gain altitude and bank to the right. As the craft looped back for a second approach, she saw that the path to the red stain was clear of small boats and other obstacles.

  Without bothering to look away from the approach, Nesbitt guessed that one of her colleagues—a Plum Island technician named Peterson—must now be wearing a very puzzled expression. It was something she had become accustomed to, during the two years since her return from Tibet.

  “You can start collecting as soon as we come to a stop,” she called aft. “We should be right on top of this stuff.”

  “Don’t you think we should meet up with Captain MacCready first?” Peterson asked.

  Nesbitt gave her shoulder-length brown hair the slightest of shakes. “I’ll do that after you’ve secured our initial samples.” She looked across to Plum Island’s latest acquisition, Dr. Hata. He had not eaten since the first leg of their flight, and his face seemed to be turning whiter than the inside of an apple. Poor devil, she told herself. Soon he’ll have seasickness on top of airsickness.

  Two minutes later the plane had come out of its extended circuit around the caldera and she could feel the Catalina’s pilot throttle back the engines. As the craft contacted the surface of the lagoon, Nora Nesbitt watched the V-shaped keel throw off a spray of red-tinted water.

  Through the periscope, Alexi Chernov also saw the American seaplane la
nd.

  An interesting new development, he thought, though he now felt a twinge of apprehension at what he had decided to do.

  With Dmitri still trying to track down MacCready and his party, Alexi knew there could be no further contact with his brother until the following day. Both of them were skilled at adapting to the unpredictable—and the flying boat currently bobbing in the middle of the very material they had been sent to investigate (with a whole research and listening vessel now lost) certainly counted as an unpredictable occurrence. Confident that the batteries in his mini-sub would allow him to remain comfortably submerged for another two days, Alexi steered toward a position some two hundred yards from the strange-looking plane. There he planned to continue observing the Americans from the safety of periscope depth.

  Even before the Catalina’s propellers had stopped spinning, Nora Nesbitt gave instructions to Peterson, then headed toward the aft section of the plane. She encountered a crewman standing beside one of the unique Plexiglas blisters that bulged outward from the fuselage on either side.

  “Can you open that please, Private?” Nora said, gesturing toward the six-foot-wide, bubble-shaped window.

  Supported by metal frames, the upper portion of the blisters could be pivoted back. In wartime, this provided a pair of waist gunners with excellent fields of vision into which they could aim their .50-caliber machine guns. With the gun barrel swung downward, each opening served double duty as an exit and cargo hatch.

  The chief gunner on this mission, whose name she’d determined to be McQueen, followed instructions. Once the blister was open, the two exchanged places, Nesbitt positioning her upper body through the open hatch. She took a deep breath, savoring the salt air but paying little attention to the spectacular surroundings. The invertebrate-biologist-cum-microbiologist concentrated on the familiar tint of the water just outside the plane, and for a moment, just for a moment, she thought about leaning over to scoop up a handful. The idea was quickly nixed after an unexpected, final positioning swerve of the plane threatened to topple her headfirst into the lagoon.