The Darwin Strain

by Bill Schutt

  If only . . .

  Chapter 11

  Secret Wars

  You ask me what God was doing before he created the materials of Heaven and earth. He was creating Hell for people who asked questions like that.

  —Saint Augustine

  Something hidden? Go and find it!

  —Rudyard Kipling

  July 2, 1948

  Santorini

  From a height of only ten stories, along the port of Fira’s donkey path, Mac could look across the full width of the flooded crater. He was able to determine precisely the direction from which a helicopter was approaching—still at least a couple dozen miles away, and impossible to spot behind the crater rim’s southern hills. Yanni heard it too, and it seemed incredible to Mac that their hearing had grown so keen. Among the rest of their group, now near the top of the path and headed toward the quarry, he supposed that Alan and Nesbitt were also able to hear the approach. He was not so sure about Cousteau’s hearing, though it was plain that something related to the ‘red moctus proctus’ was infecting him.

  “Chopper’s been sent from Crete,” Mac concluded.

  “So glad you promised no helicopters this time,” Yanni replied.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to just settle for me not crashing you in one again,” he said, and continued looking around.

  As near as he and Yanni could tell, Nesbitt’s Catalina was still floating more or less intact at the base of the cliff. Viewed from on high, it was easy to reconstruct the pattern of spray from the turret gunner who had transferred command of his senses over to panic. And in this manner at least one and perhaps two of the Kraken had died. Down there at the bottom of a donkey trail, the descendants of Seed’s stone-throwing adversaries had met the descendants of the caretaker’s lair. Although all of the tentacles and large body parts were removed from the field of slaughter, their copper-based blood was still spreading across concrete slabs as if little springs had yawned open, as if the earth itself were bleeding.

  For a long time, Mac and Yanni remained silent, and simply continued looking about, while a breeze came down from the north and riffled their hair. And just once, Mac suspected he saw the faint hint of ripples in the blood, as if from a foot stepping into a puddle.

  It did not happen again, so he quickly tried to convince himself that maybe it did not happen at all.

  “What do you suppose we’ll be facing if they can come higher ashore than a boat or the dock?” he said at last.

  “I’ve thought about that,” said Yanni.

  “And?”

  “They’ll probably tear us apart in our sleep. See? I’ve thought about that.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Any time, Mac. Ain’t like you need me to give you too many things to worry about.”

  The sound of rotor blades strengthened in the distance and, below, the puddles of cephalopod blood were quiescent . . . for now.

  Mac had learned long ago that the road to hell was wide to begin with, but there was always someone or something just waiting to steepen the incline, and add a little slipperiness to it. His own First Law emphasized the point: When you think you have thought of everything, and think you are finally safe—watch out, because nature will think of something else.

  As the helicopter finally came into view, a huge flotilla of low-hanging clouds advanced from the opposite direction. They rained streamers of mist and painted the lagoon’s surface in shadows so black that, when contrasted against shafts of sunlight, the rains trailing out behind the clouds resembled volcanic ash. Then, suddenly, blinding gray fog shot across Mac and Yanni’s overlook, and visibility dropped to no more than a dozen yards. Though Santorini was mostly a desert island, its weather had a flair for the dramatic. Few places on earth transitioned so abruptly from a bone-dry simmer to fog and cold rain—all of this rendered stranger and brighter still by the passing flotilla, as the fog bank finally pulled free and raced south with the rest of its fleet.

  Only through gaps in distant sheets of rainfall was it possible to trace the path of the helicopter. It slowed to a hover above shallow water and was promptly obscured by veils of dark rain. In the next moment, an opening between clouds shone light upon the outline of a frogman descending on a line, illuminating him as if targeted by a search lamp, until the next cloudburst reached, and hid, the chopper. When it reappeared, the aircraft’s line was being reeled in, and its frogman had recovered something.

  “Looks like a body,” Yanni said.

  Mac let out a low grunt and continued watching, trying to figure out what kind of mission they were witnessing.

  The helicopter had almost reached the halfway point between its initial destination—the body—and the town of Fira when Mac became aware of a curious discomfort, as if his subconscious were trying to keep him alive with a warning. The sensation was at once physical and psychological, as if some creature had just caressed his spine with little banana fingers. He felt the skin along his arms break out in a chill of gooseflesh—which had nothing at all to do with a fresh sprinkling of cold rain.

  “Yanni?”

  Now clearly alarmed, she had stopped watching the helicopter and was scrutinizing the donkey path and the nearest cliffs instead.

  “Don’t shoot or run until you’re sure we’re being attacked?” Yanni whispered.

  Shoot at what? Run where? Mac asked himself.

  Down there at the dock, beneath the anvil of the sun and before Private McQueen demonstrated anesthesiology at short notice, Mac had watched the cephalopods falter in their movements, as if the air itself were their enemy. But now? In the rain? He supposed he and Yanni could outrun one of them in a fifty-yard dash, but if cloud cover and soft rains allowed several to come as high ashore as they wanted—

  Right, Mac reminded himself. Yanni thought about that.

  Then he noticed how all of her attention was focused on a single flicker of movement, some twenty-five or thirty paces down the donkey trail. Something—two somethings—began shifting swiftly to and fro, so swiftly that their attempts to blend in against the rocks fell behind by a second or two. Fractured by time-framing, the odd skin patterns of lagging camouflage reminded Mac of Picasso’s or Duchamp’s women in cubism, descending their stairs. He could not focus clearly on either of the creatures—cubist paintings pacing back and forth with what appeared to be agitated impatience.

  One of them transformed into a whirlwind of distorted shapes, stood up to about the height of a man, and began to approach.

  “Can we run now?” Mac whispered.

  Yanni did not answer. There was no time. As if summoned by the beast’s decision to lunge forward, another shape dropped down from the rocks behind them. It landed on the donkey trail and rushed past Yanni, shoving her aside.

  All Mac saw was the shove. In that same instant, while dropping reflexively to shield Yanni and drawing his revolver, he chastised himself for not assuming a back-to-back defensive stance from the start.

  “Don’t!” Yanni warned.

  During one small part of a second, Mac thought she was warning him, but by the time he blinked and took aim, he realized that it was a man who had shoved her aside, and who seemed about to take an encounter already going badly, down to the next level of hell—by throwing grenades. The target was too near for everyone to survive the blast.

  “Idiot!” Mac called out, as the three “grenades,” one after another, burst like water balloons against two Kraken, spraying them with white powder. They flickered with fierce, cold lightning, let out high-pitched warbles of pain, and retreated all the way downhill, fleeing into the water with loud, clumsy splashes.

  “It’s only table salt,” the stranger announced, holding out one of the balloons. Eyeing MacCready severely, he added, “Never point your gun at a Russian when he’s saving your life.”

  July 2, 1948

  Central Park West, New York City

  The past two hours were turning into a masterpiece of wrong moves.

  Genya had plac
ed a cup of coffee next to Victor and unfolded a napkin containing two dunking doughnuts.

  “Not there!” Victor warned. “Spill that and we can ruin the films.”

  “Sorry,” Genya replied, and moved the coffee and breakfast to the top of the hotel room’s ornate wooden radio chest. And there, the crisis—or even the possibility of crisis—should have ended.

  “These film casings are ready, Genya. Now are you ready for your run?”

  “A few cups of coffee helped. As they say here, helped a great deal. It should be easy now—a piece of pie.”

  “Good,” said Victor, and placed one of the nickels into Genya’s palm. He admired his own workmanship through a magnifier.

  Victor scooped up two more of the film-concealing nickels and handed them over, then turned hurriedly to the work table, flipping over a quarter and several dollar bills before going slightly pale. “I only have three,” he said at last.

  “What do you mean, you only have three? We made four of them.”

  “Four! Yes! Where is the fourth nickel?”

  Genya reached into his pockets and fumbled around. He pulled out several dimes and two pennies, while simultaneously backtracking his every recent action and everything he had seen, as if a very detailed movie picture were being played through his brain: I read the newspaper while eating the egg sandwich and drinking my coffee. On the top right of the front page, the price of the paper . . . Three cents . . . the change I received would have been two cents if—and he saw the moment in which both pennies were placed in his hand . . . “Oh, shit!”

  “No . . .”

  Genya bolted out the door and down the main stairwell, with Victor following only a couple of seconds behind and each of them bounding down two and three stairs at a time.

  “The newsboy,” Genya whispered, as they emerged onto the street. Regaining control over his composure and keeping his voice low enough, trying not to attract attention, he continued, “I’m certain of it. I gave a nickel to the newsboy.”

  The boy was gone.

  “There is nothing to be done for it,” Victor said, “except for you to meet our associate at LaGuardia.”

  “He’s expecting four.”

  “Tell him we only had time to make three copies. I’ll solve the rest of our problem.”

  “How?”

  “Do not worry. I’ll find the boy, and buy him out. You just hurry and hand over the change.”

  Victor turned away and began searching. He walked the whole neighborhood out to a distance of five blocks, trying to find the newsboy. The child was a familiar fixture in the area, especially on summer mornings. But today he had moved on.

  By the time Genya returned from LaGuardia, Victor was back on duty at the listening post. “Can’t find him,” he mumbled, without looking up from the controls. The museum was broadcasting only silence.

  “Shit.”

  “Forget about it,” Victor said, trying to sound confident. “The kid’s probably spent it on a comic book by now. And that nickel’s screwed together tighter than Jack Benny’s wallet.”

  Genya nodded, trying to shore up his own self-confidence in the midst of what he knew to be a potentially lethal mistake. “And even if it does eventually get opened,” he added, pointing to the side of his own head, “they’ll never learn the cypher key.”

  “No worries,” Victor said. “After it changes hands through just one or two candy stores or into the nearest Woolworth’s, who will remember the path of any single nickel, all the way back to us?”

  July 2, 1948

  Santorini

  “Salt grenades?” Mac asked, his sidearm now holstered.

  “They are mollusks, correct?” said the Russian. “Ever sprinkle salt on a slug?”

  “Can’t say I have,” Mac replied. “That’s what made you think to fill condoms with salt?”

  “Best defensive mechanism is usually the simplest one,” he said, staring up at the approaching helicopter.

  They all looked up, as it flew over the cliff top, en route to Fira. A body dangled from its line, and even though the aircraft passed more than nine hundred feet overhead, they could determine the color of the man’s clothing.

  The first to speak was the Russian. Only one word escaped his lips: “Alexi.”

  Aboard the helicopter, Bishop George Marinatos did not notice the three upturned faces along the donkey trail. Though neither a politician nor a general, he had been assigned emergency protocol powers, to determine the nature of the Santorini lagoon manifestations, and decide the actions to be taken. Reluctantly, Bishop Marinatos had been awakened this very morning with new papers and an ancient scepter placed into his hands, declaring him the most powerful figure on Crete and its surrounding islands. That quickly, and once again for the islands, separation of church and state had ceased to be.

  The bishop searched the ground through frustratingly shaky binoculars, trying to reconstruct in his own mind the details of the battle that had taken place near the Catalina. They were not low enough, and the damaged plane was falling behind too quickly. Turning his attention ahead, he noticed an encampment in the middle of Fira Quarry and the little knot of people moving hastily toward it with two donkeys bearing crates.

  “Something’s wrong,” he called out to the pilot. “We should circle around and have a closer look.”

  “Something’s wrong?” the pilot replied. “Those people are probably armed, like everyone else on these islands. Drop down and dangle a body over their heads and something will be terribly wrong—for us.”

  The frogman, seated behind the bishop, packed away the last of his gear and tapped him on the shoulder. “We’ll have all of this figured out, soon,” he said, and pointed the pilot toward a landing spot near the Fira police station.

  “That’s going to be a tight fit for us,” the pilot said. Marinatos shrugged. The only landing place near the station was atop the remains of a brick-and-mortar house that had cracked from rooftop to foundation during a recent earthquake and had to be razed to the ground. Even as they radioed ahead and began to close the last thousand feet, neighbors were still salvaging bricks and needed to be cleared from the only reasonably flat and wide piece of real estate for a quarter mile in any direction.

  Marinatos could see that police and volunteers were trying to clear people from the streets as well, but not soon enough. The body had been recovered and flown from the wreck site too quickly and too many had now seen it.

  And the sea turned into a red fluid like the blood of a corpse. The line from a first-century prophecy kept turning over and over in Bishop Marinatos’s head, reminding him, This is no Fatima, no Lourdes. And even if it were, the Greek Orthodox Church remained undecided whether those two places were miracles, or false signs.

  There were so many ways that the apocalyptic books (and there were many such books) could be interpreted or misinterpreted—so many ways to even unintentionally misuse the ancient verses—that the orthodoxy never read them aloud to their congregations.

  Who was it, really? he wondered, as the vacant lot and clusters of white-painted buildings rose slowly toward him. Who was “He who will lead them to the springs of living water”?

  It seemed impossible to know. There were descriptions of monsters with horns and multiple serpent heads. And it was already horribly apparent that something monstrous had drawn a midget submarine of unknown nationality into shallow water, extracted a crewman, and left him outside—mutilated.

  With less than three hundred feet to go, the brick-littered lot up ahead began puffing clouds of dust into the air. At first the bishop believed it to be caused by the wash of the helicopter blades, but the dust was too far ahead of him and blowing from the wrong direction, and the streets in all directions seemed to have been similarly disturbed.

  “Seems they’ve just had another little quake,” the pilot announced.

  “Abort?” the frogman asked.

  “No. We are still safe for landing.”

  Bishop Marina
tos glanced toward Nea Kameni. The blue dome of a church rose to eclipse his view of volcanic cinder cones and blood-red water, and he worried about the stories of miraculous healings at Santorini, and the prophecies about “springs of living water.” He worried because he knew other, more ominous verses: There arose from the sea before our eyes an animal, a dragon . . . Red, it arose, and it broke apart as if giving birth. And most of all he began to worry about the damaged plane at the dock, and the people he had seen marching toward an apparently clandestine encampment in the quarry.

  Foreigners, he concluded with grim certainty, as the helicopter’s skids touched down. Miracle waters or not, in their stumbling around they have awakened the dragons.

  “The Symplegades,” Mac thought aloud as he, Yanni, and Dmitri Chernov approached the Fira police station. Traces of tremor-displaced dust were still lingering in the air.

  “The clashing rocks that almost smashed the Argonauts,” Dmitri replied.

  “Yep. That’s sort of what we’re walking into right now.” The analogy was dramatic, but not necessarily a false one. Even among the mainland’s communist insurgents, life had become the story of “a rock clashing against a hard place.” During the previous month, in the north, Stalin had renounced Yugoslavia’s communist leader, Tito. On mainland Greece, in almost a mirror image of America’s committees on un-American activities, the Greek Communist Party was embarking upon a McCarthy-esque witch hunt against the Tito-ists.

  “MacCready, isn’t it hard to believe how your comrades, my comrades, and the Greeks—how together, one day, we all won the war against Hitler?”

  “I guess winning the war’s never as tough as keeping the peace,” Yanni observed.

  “And here on Santorini,” Dmitri replied, “they mostly support you Americans. So what will they think when you walk in there with a Russian?”