The Darwin Strain

by Bill Schutt

  “Yob tvoyu mat!” he shouted, and stood up again, cupping one side of his face with a hand. The needle had side-swiped cartilage, slicing the back of his right ear in two.

  “The surgeon should look at that,” the captain said.

  “Not yet,” said Lysenko. He glared at the animal, and the animal glared also into him, seething.

  “May I presume, Doctor, that according to your theory, inflicting new wounds will make it stronger?”

  “A proper experiment, no?”

  “Absolutely, it is. I’m just . . .”

  “Say what you think, Captain. We are all family here, aboard this ship.”

  “It’s just . . . I think we should begin to consider just how far that creature’s voice travels out through our hull. We still do not know how many of them are out there. Or how many different kinds exist. Or how big they grow. Or the level of their intelligence.”

  “How smart do you think they can get?”

  The captain held out the copper disk. “Five thousand years ago we used copper to cut stones for the pyramids. So they’re up near our Bronze Age, or somewhere beyond it. And here’s the scary thought: What if there are Kraken philosophers, listening to this prisoner’s cries, as they try to figure out what to do about their human problem?”

  1180 a.d.

  The Viking Territories

  For nearly 2,600 years, the lineage of Pliny the Elder’s “polypus” had been making pilgrimages to the Santorini lagoon, and occasionally setting up long-term encampments there. Through all those years, the descendant Stone-thrower civilizations that swirled around the island came and went like a dream. The splendid architecture of Kyri and Semut’s city was simultaneously strewn about and buried, like Pompeii. The Greeks came and went. Pliny’s Romans came and went. A dark age came and did not go away.

  In the twelfth century, only a pitiful dying ember of a red vent still burned on the hidden foothills of Santorini’s submerged volcano. In the year 1150 a pilgrimage of cephalopods had departed the lagoon with samples and slipped through the Strait of Gibraltar, seeking out a suitable transplant location in the nearest ocean. After many a winter, searching far above and below the equator, a call went out from the waters near Iceland, meaning: Found . . . Found. A newly emerged undersea geyser of unusual mineral composition was helping the red microbe to establish a foothold, just barely, as the Atlantic’s first way station.

  During the years that followed, the Viking Saga of Övrar-Oddr began recording encounters with the many-armed Kraken, apparently resistant to arrows and axes. The Viking account made it difficult to discern whether the sailors encountered a single huge animal or many smaller ones working together to snatch men and livestock from a ship and then, amid a sea of sometimes invisible tentacles, create a swirling maelstrom that they feared could drag down a dozen vessels.

  After that, the legend grew, as did the imagined size of the monster, until fact blended undetectably within rapidly mutating fairy tales. Some claimed that a single Kraken could devour an entire fleet at once, leaving empty ships adrift, like ghosts. Eventually the Kraken was said to measure more than a mile across, easily mistaken for an island when resting on the surface of the sea. A bishop from Nidros, according to legend, was searching for a new place to settle his flock when he discovered one of the old mapmakers’ mysterious drifting islands. The bishop and his followers landed and celebrated their deliverance with a church service and did not realize the truth until, after the planting of a flag, the Kraken awoke.

  Chapter 19

  Icarus

  The Kraken sleepeth . . .

  Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;

  Then once by man and angels be seen,

  In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson

  July 10, 1948

  Two Miles Southwest of Santorini

  The tank treads that Trofim Lysenko’s sonar man had imagined he heard crawling along the seafloor were quite real. They were in fact the treads of America’s first nuclear-powered submarine, the NR-3.

  There was no NR-1. No NR-2 either. Admiral Hyman Rickover had chosen the name to keep the Russians wondering, if they ever found out about the machine’s existence, just how many of these the U.S. Navy actually built and deployed.

  The vessel was only ninety feet long, with more than half of that length taken up by Rickover’s own nuclear electric engine design—the smallest reactor General Electric had ever built. The nose of the ship was graded at “virtually indestructible” by its designers from Corning Glass Works. It provided an extraordinarily wide view, like the cockpit of a B-29 bomber, and the seating arrangement behind the superhard ceramic windows was therefore borrowed from the B-29.

  Directly behind the pilot and copilot, the flight engineer’s seat was occupied by a World War II OSS man named Walter—now called back to duty as “Number T070.”

  Oh, that view is tremendous, he thought. In the back of his mind, Walter regretted that, among the men and women that the sub’s Operation Racoon Jump commandos were being sent to rescue, two of them—R. J. MacCready and his friend Cousteau—could not be here to appreciate the scenery. He knew they’d have loved to be sitting where he was now. But normal circumstances precluded this. Rickover’s toy was so secret that the crew’s wives would never know where they were serving, or that the machine even existed.

  Walter did not have a wife. The committed playboy left a lasting impression on his British friend Ian’s “Room 39 Group,” for whom “T070” had served as OSS liaison during the war. Walter’s taste in wine and bourbon was as impeccable as his taste for the beautiful women who all but threw themselves at him and, after an adventure or two, were invariably sent along on their own. This, Ian once told him, was beginning to inform a fictional character he had in mind. They had both decided, during the lead-up to Normandy, that they would eventually leave the service of his majesty and the president, to write books. Yet, despite a hefty bet on who would publish first, Walter felt that he was sure to lose. Ian was already far along with his sketches and dialogue for a story about a flying car—What’s he calling it this week? Shitty-shitty-bang-bang?

  During these years of so-called peace, Walter had not come up with even his first sentence.

  He looked out through the cockpit, upon an undersea landscape no diver had seen before—looked out upon what appeared to be the stones of an ancient dock, more than two hundred feet beneath the shores of Santorini. Thinking of the people who must have perished in some long-forgotten quake, and of the book he seemed perpetually unable to write, he dictated to himself, Page One: “Call me fishmeal.”

  Hopeless, he thought. I’ll never come up with the right book.

  Walter stowed the thought away in favor of more pressing realities. Under negative buoyancy, the NR-3 was immune to the unpredictable tantrums of currents, and it moved on treads through even the worst deepwater storms with the agility of a jeep. The captain and his copilot were bringing their sub down to what they called “baby-crawl speed,” and now it was Walter’s turn to take the controls.

  Like a bombardier controlling a plane’s final targeting maneuvers, the man from Truman’s CIA brought the NR-3 to the desired spot. Ordering “Full stop”—the equivalent of “bombs away”—from his flight engineer’s seat, Walter manipulated an external mechanical claw as if it were an extension of his own hand, and anchored one of the sub’s three sono-buoys between two giant rectangular stones.

  “What’s that last position you got, again?” the copilot asked.

  “Coming up more clearly in just a minute,” said Walter. He reeled out the line, just far enough for the buoy, floating overhead like a balloon on a string, to remain concealed within fifteen feet of the surface. As the signals began coming down, he checked his maps—which included the position of one very noisy ship named Kursk, and a steadily narrowing search area for the “Catalina captives.”

  “We’ve now got them nailed within two hundred
yards,” Walter announced. “It’s as we hoped. The Russians are getting restless—and a bit overconfident. They’ve been broadcasting to their ships.”

  “How much longer till we have a better fix on them?”

  “I’m betting, long before we hear them moving our people around in small boats.”

  “That may not be soon enough.”

  “Why the hurry?” said Walter. “You have somewhere more important to be? We running out of air?”

  “Air, we got,” the copilot said. “And enough fresh water for a single bucket shower every three days. Time? That’s a whole other question.”

  For two days they had been moving buoys around, hoping that the commandos on the island would get careless and start broadcasting coded signals. Whether or not the codes were broken did not matter. Only the simple geometry of triangles mattered—the mathematics of modern warfare, courtesy of Euclid.

  Walter supposed there was air enough and time enough to render every adversary within range a victim of mathematics. The generator had sufficient electrical power to desalinate seawater into drinking water, while breaking down enough of the water molecules themselves to produce breathable oxygen. They could remain submerged for many weeks, even months. The only limiting factors were the amount of food they had aboard for a crew of thirteen, and how much time remained before the Russians began either killing or trading prisoners.

  “If we can move another buoy to the northeast,” the captain said, “I think we will be able—”

  Walter raised a hand for silence, cupped a pair of headphones tightly to his ears, then began jotting down calculations and drawing new lines on one of the maps.

  “Got them!” he announced. “They’re broadcasting again and this new buoy’s position narrows the target within . . .” He drew a circle around a maximum range of error for the new set of intersecting lines and handed the map forward.

  “Only twenty yards?” the captain asked.

  “That’s what I have,” Walter replied. “So now we can begin talking about a specific building. That’s where we’ll find the MacCready and Nesbitt crews.”

  “If we move soon,” the captain said, and turned his head northeast, toward the triangulated location, “and if the Russians don’t move out of there before nightfall.”

  “If we drive off from here,” said Walter, “we’ll have to disconnect from the buoys and rise to radio-reception depth. See if Captain Christian is sending out any new orders from ‘the Fighting Eye.’”

  “Already on it. Pumping ballast.”

  Walter watched the great stone blocks of a sunken harbor receding into glass-clear water as the NR-3 slowly gained altitude. A school of strange, eel-like fish passed below—and, beyond the fish, something metallic drew the attention of the pilots.

  The captain banked their boat gracefully to port and three more metallic objects came into view—shreds of aluminum hull, none of them any wider than the diameter of a dinner plate. Like a set of antennae, two recently repurposed mine detectors were now deployed from below the cockpit.

  “We’re in a debris field,” the copilot said. Walter felt the push of a half-dozen American commandos crowding forward right behind him. No one really wanted to miss what might be coming into view next. “Metal detectors picking up multiple targets—like we’re heading into a junkyard.”

  They descended gently, like a helicopter, landing before what had once been the cockpit of a bomber, deformed into twisted agony the moment it struck water.

  The captain called back to Walter: “What do you make of it, Professor?”

  “Difficult to say. Pieces of the instrument panel have writing on them.” Before Walter could ask the pilots to move the sub nearer, they were already negatively buoyant again and inching forward on treads. Part of a flight seat was still bolted to a fragment of flooring. Three of the strange eels they had seen earlier appeared to be nibbling at something.

  “We are now inside the plane,” the copilot joked.

  “You move to the head of the class,” Walter replied. He reached out with a robot arm, clawed loose a sheet of instrument paneling, and brought it up close to NR-3’s cockpit window. As he rotated the panel, it became easy to distinguish the inspection stamps and control labels despite the numerous scratches across its face.

  “Lord!” Walter’s captain said. “I was expecting Russian but that’s not what I’m reading, is it?”

  “No. Similar—but it’s really Serbian-Slavic.”

  “You certain?”

  “No doubt of it,” said Walter. “Yugoslavia.”

  “Jesus Christ on a suffering pony. Does this mean we’re into it against Stalin and Tito?”

  July 10, 1948

  Captured MacCready Base Camp #3

  Santorini

  “D-djya eat?” Nesbitt asked.

  “Yeah,” Mac replied.

  “Me too. Something’s changed. They seem happy to feed us now.”

  “All of us?”

  “I think so,” said Nesbitt. “I saw them carrying dishes into the room where they keep Cousteau and the other Frenchman.”

  Mac glared across the long table at which they sat handcuffed. Three commandos stood guard over them—one for each: Nesbitt, Mac, and Yanni.

  The past week felt like a month, maybe more.

  Is that all it’s been? Mac asked himself. Just a few short days?

  For most people, after the age of sixteen, the perception of time’s passage had a way of speeding up. By age twenty, a year typically seemed only a couple of months, compared to what the waiting time between day one of a new school year and the next summer vacation used to be. Yet for Mac, time itself seemed to have become unhinged.

  The four years since he first stood with Yanni on the edge of Brazil’s Mato Grosso Plateau had so crowded his memory with new and unprecedented events that—God, Mac told himself. Seems like thirty years ago. Seems like forty.

  “As you have probably guessed by now,” Dmitri called from an adjacent room, “your situation is changing.” When he strode in and stood at one end of the table, the Russian looked and acted every bit the man in charge, but Mac detected hints of a well-concealed anxiety.

  The submariner motioned one of the commandos to uncuff Mac’s feet and announced, “I’d like to give you a guided tour, Captain MacCready.”

  “What? Show me the instruments of torture?”

  “In a manner of speaking, Captain.” Dmitri then shuffled him out a door and uphill toward the nearest overlook.

  Hands still cuffed in front of him, Mac was marched forward with haste, until Dmitri halted him atop a mound of loose, grayish-white pumice.

  “Captain,” Dmitri said, seeming to have sensed that Mac disliked being called by his title.

  “Captain Chernov,” Mac replied.

  For a long time the two men said nothing, just stood in the wind and the heat, watching clouds advancing from the west.

  The Kursk and its two sister ships formed a small but possibly impenetrable picket in the south. Dmitri pointed toward three more ships in the north. Then, as if responding to a prearranged cue, a formation of two Russian jets flew overhead, followed by another formation of two.

  Mac shook his head.

  “So, this is it,” Dmitri said. “Checkmate.”

  “Makes sense,” Mac conceded. It was easy to see, merely by the way they moved, that the planes were loaded to maximum capacity with extra fuel tanks and weaponry.

  “Wish it could have worked out a little differently, MacCready. But you understand: My country, right or wrong? We’re ‘rescuing’ this island now. We own it.”

  “Yeah. But for how long?”

  “For as long as it takes to get the thing everyone seems to want, and to get rid of the monsters that guard it.”

  Get rid of them? Mac wondered. He imagined that for every biological success story like the Kraken—even with the red miracle operating in its favor—there must be a hundred unknown evolutionary dead ends. Do Dmitri’s people n
ot realize how biologically fine-tuned these animals really are?

  The scientist searched the horizon and saw, under a fleet of clouds, a distant speck that Dmitri overlooked. It had been growing a little darker each time Mac glanced in that direction—growing at what he estimated to be an approach velocity of twenty knots, maybe more.

  “Those ships of ours, and these jets,” Dmitri said. “Whatever it costs, we’ll back them up. This isn’t an attack; it’s what your people on Broadway might call an audition. One of your Russian counterparts in the sciences wishes to audition new life. He’s probing this island, and your country, right now.”

  “Probing?”

  “Yes. This is the thunder, Captain MacCready. You haven’t seen the lightning yet.”

  Mac glanced again at the horizon. Twenty-two knots, he concluded. It’s definitely coming in at twenty-two. A sudden motion drew his attention to the southern picket. The center ship, Trofim Lysenko’s ship, shifted its two forward cannons, taking aim at something.

  July 10, 1948

  Aboard the NR-3

  Southwest of Santorini

  They had moved on from the debris field of the Yugoslavian plane and found their path to the best landing spot for a prisoner rescue attempt, interrupted. A second debris field lay strewn before them, created by something considerably more massive than a plane.

  During the past few hours, the sea had come alive with sonar pings radiating out from multiple ships converging on Santorini. Taking care not to send out any new pings of their own, the two pilots navigated by the known undersea topography around the island, and by the magnetic anomalies of older, carefully charted wrecks.

  New metallic anomalies indicated pots, trays, ladles, and tin cups—strewn like chaff along the bottom. When Walter looked briefly away from his instruments and viewed the artifacts directly through the cockpit, he casually named the place “Hell’s Kitchen.” Neither of the pilots responded. Bright splotches on one of Walter’s screens were already indicating something quite large, now bearing no more than thirty yards beyond their range of vision.