The Darwin Strain

by Bill Schutt

  Chapter 16

  A Study in Scarlet

  Man is the unnatural child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that raised him.

  —H. G. Wells

  July 5, 1948

  Santorini

  Sunrise always came to the island in slow and stately stages; but this day, morning came on like a thunderbolt.

  “A heavy cruiser has just entered the lagoon,” Yanni radioed from the overlook. “Mac confirms: Russian. It’s holding position just inside the rim—half mile east of Therasia. Over.”

  “Copy that,” Alan replied. “Repeat. Confirmed Russian? Over.”

  “Confirmed. Over.”

  “Roger that. Ru—”

  “Uhh—damn! It’s launching something! Small boat. Fast!”

  Alan tried to say something but blips of static washed out his transmission from the encampment. The lagoon and all of the island fragments around it were being pinged, apparently across every radio frequency.

  “Targeting radar,” Mac said to Yanni. “A bit more advanced than I would have guessed.” He belly-crawled up to the cliff edge with a pair of field glasses. What the devil? he thought, as he focused on the ship’s guns and Yanni eased up beside him. “That’s definitely some pretty advanced engineering,” Mac observed. “Looks like some of the stuff on our own drawing boards that hasn’t even been built yet.”

  The smaller of the vessel’s two radar sweepers, mounted high atop its central mast, was making at least two complete revolutions per second. On the aft end, two guns seemed to be scanning the cliffs south of the Fira Quarry. As their barrel sights passed over and then moved southward of their position, Yanni asked, “How bad does this look?”

  “About the ten-thousand-rounds-per-minute kind of bad,” Mac replied. “And those two cannons on the bow—no space for a gunner. There’s some guy in a control booth somewhere, guided by radar and able to move those things really fast. He can probably drop shells wherever he wants, out to about twelve miles.”

  “That’s more than ’nough to hit any point on this island.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “Well, if they do decide to aim at us, at least you won’t have to explain Dmitri and the rest of this whole mess to Hendry.”

  “You really do have a way of finding the silver lining in any black cloud, don’t you?” Mac asked.

  “Why not? Otherwise I’d end up like you.”

  A second Soviet ship nosed out from behind the westernmost arch of the Santorini crescent. At first it appeared to be moving toward Aspronisi, the “White Island” fragment, where their navy’s “fishing boat” lay sunk and buried. But as the speedboat from the cruiser in the north neared the red plumes, the new arrival halted outside the lagoon, turned its stern in the direction of Nea Kameni, and began backing carefully toward the west inlet. MacCready was able to discern no fewer than four men struggling with lines, trying to steady a large piece of equipment dangling from an iron A-frame.

  “Looks jerry-rigged,” Mac guessed, “like the claw-and-balloon system they dropped from the bomber.”

  “I think they’ll have just as much to worry about,” said Yanni as something flickered brightly near the surface. The speedboat shifted its angle of approach—baited directly toward the flickers, between the red plumes and the shores of Nea Kamini. “Water there ain’t deep enough,” she added. “Too many rocks around and too few escape routes.”

  “I hope so,” Mac said.

  Yanni grimaced. Speeding down from the north, the Kursk’s little launch made a sharp horseshoe turn. At the southernmost point in its turn, the crew hurled a dark, tethered object overboard, swung around toward its mother ship, and applied full throttle. During the first few seconds, the Russians successfully avoided near-surface hull scrapers while playing out their line into red water. They appeared to be making good progress and it was easy to judge that they were grabbing up a significant volume of bottom samples, until it seemed suddenly as if the samples were reeling them in, instead of the other way around.

  “Do they have any idea what they’re getting themselves into?”

  “Need to study this situation,” Yanni said, taking the field glasses from Mac.

  Even without the aid of binoculars, it was easy for Mac to see two crewmen trying, with great haste, to sever the line.

  “What is it?” Mac asked. “Kraken pulling them down? Like Cousteau’s boat?”

  “Not this time. Right now, the Kraken are nowhere near that boat.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You tell me,” she said, handing over the field glasses.

  “They . . . did that?”

  “Yeah. What year do you place it? World War One?”

  “Probably,” Mac said. “Must be leftover from German mine-laying, outside the port of Kea. A whole string of those took out the Brit—”

  In less time than it would have taken Mac to complete the word, the launch and its crew disintegrated. From where it and the mine had been, black smoke billowed into the sky, flattening out at cliff-top height, then drifting lazily westward on a breeze.

  Below, subtle disturbances and glimmers in the water hinted that the Kraken were circling in. The intensity of the swirls waxed and waned, as did the sweep of the Russian ship’s targeting radar.

  Excited voices broke through walkie-talkie static. “We—kay—rep—okay—” It sounded like Alan, at the comms. “We have—lem—” he began to broadcast, before new surges of rhythmic static washed in. Fragmented shouts followed, then dropped out, except for a single word, spoken clearly and calmly and in Chinese—twice, from Dmitri: “Mookau.”

  The word had several meanings. Depending on the situation and inflection, it ranged from “Please stop” and “Don’t touch,” to “Leave me alone” and “Go away . . . you whore”—any or all of those at once.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Mac asked.

  “It means that because we know Alan, Dmitri knows we will understand.”

  “And?”

  “He’s telling us, run.”

  July 5, 1948

  Base Camp #3, Santorini

  Alan was still at the communications desk when the Koresh’s landing party surrounded the encampment.

  The gold that Nesbitt had authorized handing out as hush money was nowhere near as protective as she had anticipated.

  Within seconds of Yanni’s confirmation that the heavy cruiser in the lagoon was Russian, the signal from the overlook was washed out. Yanni’s observation that at least one secondary craft was lurking never came through to Alan at all.

  “I’d better go up and check in on them,” Nesbitt’s pilot had said, testing a walkie-talkie from across the room. At Alan’s table, the reception from the handheld device was spotty but adequate—at least, at close range. Alan gave his walkie-talkie a thumbs-up. Nesbitt waved the pilot along.

  He did not call in. He did not return.

  The explosion in the lagoon echoed several times from the cliffs in the north and west, like a series of successively longer and distorted thunderclaps.

  “Whatever that was, Mac, we’re okay here,” Alan radioed out. “Repeat. We are okay. What do you see? Over.”

  History had already recorded that the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral lasted less than thirty seconds. The battle that occurred outside Alan’s station was so many magnitudes shorter and quieter that it could hardly be called a fight. It was over before Alan radioed out the words “Wait. We’ve had a problem here.”

  The flight engineer who had shot a Kraken to pieces just an arm’s length from Yanni’s face, and who had to be “sedated” by McQueen’s wrench, was the first to react. A single shot through a sound suppressor stopped his heart—instantly and, as intended, with essentially no blood to be cleaned up afterward. A shot through Nesbitt’s hand disarmed her with very little noise or fuss. McQueen was taken down in a hallway, by an ambush body-slam that crashed his head against a wall and tore o
pen the stitches in his shoulder.

  At precisely that moment, two men rushed into Alan’s radio room, one of them brandishing a hunter’s blade, the other pointing a gun with an intimidatingly large sound suppressor. Dmitri strode in behind them, his hands unbound.

  Alan still had his fingers depressed on the send button when Dmitri commanded, loudly and with detailed inflection, “Mookau! Mookau!”—which seemed to be meant as an order to stop touching the device and step away from it. The Chinese biologist obeyed immediately, but a part of him wondered if the command to which he had just responded truly was what it seemed.

  This guy knows that if he had simply ordered me in English to step away, I would easily have understood, Alan told himself. Why did he choose that word?

  Knowing better than to actually ask, Alan turned the question over and over in his head: Why did he say that?

  Dmitri Chernov had just provided him with an even more puzzling perspective on Churchill’s view of the Russian heart: “A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Whether or not Alan lived long enough to find answers to the old mystery, the Russians would never again be the same to him.

  July 5, 1948

  Four Past Midnight

  Washington, D.C.

  “The Russians claim they are answering a plea for help,” President Truman said. “From an American Catalina, along with another plane that went down at Santorini.”

  Fellow insomniac Pat Hendry ran through a mental catalog of facts relevant to the president’s puzzle. He ran through it quickly and with great ease, partly because there really wasn’t much material from which to read. “I sent Mac and his colleague, but no Catalina.”

  “I know,” said the president. “The seaplane—it’s got to be General MacArthur again. We have him all the way out in Japan and still he’s pulling strings.”

  Truman lifted a wire-copy letter from Moscow and began reading from it: “We have received news of your crisis. Your distress is our distress. As you receive this, I am assured that our team is now at Santorini only for a humanitarian mission. Mstislav Keldysh, USSR Academy of Sciences.”

  “Academy of Sciences?” Hendry asked.

  “Yes. I hate surprises. So, what does this one mean?”

  Hendry shook his head, very slowly. “Probably that, just like us, they’re on a scientific fishing mission—same place, same thing. But why would they telegraph such intent?”

  “As I said, I hate surprises. According to the latest information I have, this phenomenon George Orwell has been calling ‘Cold War’ will not start to thaw anytime soon. You’ve been briefed on High-jump, Phase Two?”

  “Bombing Mount Erebus?”

  “Yeah. The scuttlebutt’s been simmering out there for a while,” the president said, and laughed. “That we’re at war with Antarctica. And this time, instead of Emperor Hirohito, we’re supposed to be demanding surrender from the emperor penguins.”

  “Or the Fourth Reich,” said Hendry, returning a quick grin. Up until now, both phases of the High-jump operation had presumably been bottled up quite nicely; but with the revelations coming out of Massachusetts and Manhattan worsening each passing hour, Hendry could not be sure of any reasonable limits to what the Kremlin knew. He could not imagine that towing the decommissioned Intrepid in among California’s mothballed “Ghost Fleet,” and trying stealthily to refurbish her to accommodate Grumman’s new cold-weather weaponry, had gone unnoticed. Trouble ahead, he thought, even if having ‘the Evil I’ join the High-jump fleet somehow remains unknown.

  “Fourth Reich at the South Pole,” said the president. “T’will serve. Hide a lie in the truth, or the truth in a convincing lie. It’s easier for Stalin to swallow, either way.”

  Hendry nodded. There had in actual truth been a Fourth Reich attempt, in Argentina and as far down into the margin of South Polar climate as Chile. But the Germans never did get any nearer to Antarctica than Chile and Cape Horn. By 1946, Nazi fugitives were building impressive tunnel systems and the core structures for an experimental nuclear reactor capable of manufacturing plutonium. They had even tried revitalizing Sanger’s space shuttle project, to drop atom bombs on New York and Washington from orbit. But, as Hendry knew firsthand, all the smartest German scientists (those who were not killed outright) had either been captured by the Russians or fled to France and surrendered to the Americans at war’s end. South America’s German Fourth Reich simply did not have the scientific expertise to rise again. By now, all of their Nazi gold and diamonds had run out, leaving them with little to look forward to except half-constructed reactor buildings and space-plane launch rails—little except that, and a renewed Nazi hunt emerging from Israel, followed closely by poverty, fear, death, fear of afterlife, and tomorrow.

  But the rumors live on, Hendry thought, opportunistically. “So,” he said, “Moscow knows we’ve been in Antarctica?”

  “That’s the word from New England,” said Truman. “Fortunately practice maneuvers were finished, and the fleet was already moving out when this coin-boy disaster started. So, it’s not going to be too hard to deny what the Russians think they know, or that the ships even existed—and, by the way, thank you for finding that flying saucer guy.”

  “He’s quite happy to talk about it,” said Hendry. His grin was back, and widening. “Cleveland guy. Claims he saw a foo-fighter come up glowing out of the water, during the war. He’s been trying to tell reporters we have a secret fleet attacking Antarctica—”

  “How did he find out about High-jump?”

  “Didn’t. Just a random delusion that hit the right media target. Guy claims he’s a—what did he call it? A remote viewer? A loon, to be sure. But at least for now, he’s our loon. He believes we’re attacking Antarctica because that’s where Hitler built a secret base, filled with rocket and saucer technology.”

  Hendry was confident that, as the president had said, the Cleveland guy would serve them well. There was no Hitler Antarctic rocket base, of course. No leftover Germans hiding under the ice. No foo-fighters there either. There was only an ordinary and continually reengineered, cold-resistant fleet, sent now and again since 1946, where the American navy could train far from the prying eyes of the Northern Hemisphere. They trained, presumably all the while in complete secrecy, for a possible war in the Russian Arctic, during the most challenging weeks of high-latitude night.

  “Does ‘Cleveland’ have any like-minded friends?”

  “I’ve been working on that angle, Mr. President. Got a couple of true believers. Helping to get them more news coverage. The best part is, one of these guys is finishing his doctorate at Berkeley. I’ve got good people in Boston working on getting him an advance offer from Harvard. This should add to his publicity potential and credibility, while at the same time demolishing it—”

  “—thus making saucers, secret Nazi bases, and secret American fleets indistinguishably crazy,” said the president. “We shall have more confused Russians that way.”

  “Exactly. The story will have credibility and simultaneously discredit itself, pretty much any way we wish it.”

  “Of course, if your professor—”

  “Leary’s his name,” said Hendry. “Tim Leary.”

  “Okay,” said Truman. “For now, sounds like he’s a true believer. For now, he’s serving our best interests. But if he should ever get—”

  “Too credible?” Hendry finished for him.

  “I’d hardly say that’s an impossibility.”

  “I’ve thought about it. There’s a guy who works with Joe McCarthy—very ambitious. On days when I’ve been required to take down someone’s reputation, it’s sometimes been guilt-ridden work. But my difficult work is Mr. Nixon’s hobby. If the need ever arises, he’s already got people lined up—even though he has no idea why I would want it done—who will be eager to figure out how to take Leary down.”

  “May I interrupt?” said a young law student from Boston. He stood at the doorway, looking very nervous about something.


  “Of course, Bobby—come in,” the president said, and motioned him toward a seat. “More bad news from the coin-boy investigation?”

  “Bundles. It concerns the spy ring—or rings, actually. It’s a much bigger network than we thought even a few hours ago.”

  “Go on.”

  “Two men are being pulled out of Los Alamos as we speak. They’ve been in there since ’45.”

  Truman snorted loudly. “Well, that finally explains something.”

  “What?” asked Hendry.

  “The Potsdam Conference. When I told Stalin we had successfully tested a new weapon—the first atom bomb—he simply shrugged and congratulated me. I’ve always wondered if he already knew. The rat bastard—he did not ask me a single question about it!”

  Bobby seemed unmoved, and this worried Hendry. The coin boy, Potsdam 1945, and keeping High-jump secret were clearly not what he’d come to discuss. “It gets worse, doesn’t it?” Hendry asked.

  “I’m afraid the game we all thought we were playing may not be the game at all,” Bobby said, unfolding a handwritten transcript from his pocket. “Mr. President, one of your aircraft carriers is missing.”

  July 5, 1948

  Base Camp #3, Santorini

  “You have been at play with something red,” Dmitri said, as he finished the field dressing on Nora Nesbitt’s cuffed hand.

  She did not answer. She did not express emotion.

  “You take a through-and-through shot in the palm of your hand and you don’t even bleed a faker’s stigmata? So, tell me about that. Good color in your face. No heart irregularity. No signs of shock. How is that? I’m betting this hand of yours wouldn’t even develop arthritis—if you live long enough.”