The Darwin Strain

by Bill Schutt

  “You should see the main attraction any minute, directly ahead,” said Walter. “It looks like we’re heading toward a wall of steel.”

  The captain and his copilot continued to look as if they had not been listening. They passed through an undersea dune field and came to a stop before a hill made of books instead of sand. The paper mound made Walter envision a tornado reaching into the hull of a ship and pulling an entire medical library outside.

  “Russian?” the copilot called back, pointing an external floodlamp at the book dune.

  “This time, yes. Russian. Quite definitely.”

  “What is it with all these eels?” one of the commandos asked.

  Walter looked where the commando was looking. The eels were trailing, one after another, toward the wall of steel. “They’re not eels,” he said. “They look more like hagfish—but different, somehow, maybe a species no one has seen yet.”

  “Why so many of them?”

  “That ship up ahead. Hagfish are like flies. They’re among the first to arrive at the death scene.”

  “Got any more cheery thoughts of that kind?” the captain said, and drove over the book pile. They spoke no more as they closed the last ten yards. From the very minute the hulk came into view, the NR-3 entered a blizzard of gently drifting papers—mostly from files of notes written in pencil—which Walter snatched at with the robot arm, quickly filling the sub’s sample basket. Maybe we’ll get lucky and grab some valuable secrets, he hoped. And then it occurred to him, If the Russians find out what we’re up to, we won’t last a minute. He was confident, however, that they would not be found—could not be found. The General Electric reactor was the quietest engine ever built into a submarine, and Rickover’s outer shells of fiberglass gave his boat a sonar cross section as small (and easily overlooked) as a submerged beluga whale.

  They found the Koresh tilted twenty degrees to starboard, having crashed to the bottom hard enough to push its propellers into the next deck up. Along most of one side, the hull and outer cabins were blown open and torn apart and scattered about.

  The inside of the ship could be seen as clearly as the exploded plane’s cockpit. Exposed cabins and companionways were full of debris: The search lamps illuminated drifting paper . . . torn mattresses . . . unfamiliar electrical equipment . . . the occasional body—and crabs. Crabs everywhere. The crabs had arrived in even greater numbers than the “eels,” and still they were coming.

  Walter had seen this sort of thing before, and it was a reason that the one thing he knew he would never write was a book bearing the word “autobiography” in its title. He started breathing faster and one of the commandos tapped him on the shoulder, gently, drawing his attention away from an unusually large mass of crabs and something bad beneath the swarm. He returned the man a thumbs-up okay signal and focused his attention on a ripped leather satchel with papers sticking out—likely qualifying as the espionage equivalent of “pay dirt.” After forcing the satchel into the sample tray and locking down the lid, he looked up and noticed a curious movement in what appeared to have been the ship’s infirmary. It was a body—and, like the nine or ten others he had seen here, it was becoming so bloated that buttons and shirt seams were starting to pop open. Walter believed he had become accustomed during the war to the way the drowned undressed themselves; but even as the NR-3 steered toward the ship’s bridge and the search lamps began to swing their beams away from the infirmary, he realized that even MacCready and Cousteau might not be able to heal fully from the apparition that bid him adieu.

  The Russian was straining to lift his chest and arms off the floor, where the tangled frame of a bolted-to-the-deck operating table had pinned his legs. The muscles of his right arm rippled beneath the loose, blue-tinted skin, and then the limb extended at the elbow, as if reaching out to the NR-3 crew, pleadingly.

  For a moment, it held them all spellbound. It did not matter that the lights were swiveling away, or that the sudden splitting of flesh into an eruption of hagfish from within occurred mostly in shadow. Being able to see less than half of what was actually happening made the memory of it even worse. The imagination quickly filled in too many unseen details of the “eel man.”

  Up to this moment, Walter thought he owed a debt to Mac and Cousteau. The community of polymathic, wanderlust agents to which they belonged was very small, and so it was perfectly natural that MacCready had been among the first to encourage Walter’s growing fascination with the submersible corps. But now the submariner vowed that if he ever saw either of his friends alive, he would swear them personally to an oath: “Punch me in the face if you ever hear me talking about climbing into one of these things again.”

  To be trapped in a compartment in a doomed and flooding vessel had to be a horrible way to die, he finally realized, in a way that had never quite been driven home to him before. Damn! What could be more horrible?

  And in that very same instant, Walter’s long-running struggle with writer’s block ended. The “eel man” shattered it, and the first line of his book came to him with uncanny ease, as if dictated to him by a suddenly awakened muse: “In 1898 a struggling writer named Morgan Robertson concocted a novel about a fabulous Atlantic liner. . . .” But this was as far as he got, before two shells from the Kursk pounded down on water and exploded somewhere overhead.

  The NR-3 went dark.

  That quickly, the mission objective at the MacCready prison site began to fall apart.

  July 10, 1948

  Aboard the “Fighting I”

  On Approach to Santorini

  Captain Charles L. Christian stood on a narrow catwalk alongside his bridge and searched the horizon with a pair of binoculars.

  “Who the hell are they firing at?” he demanded.

  The captain’s electronics expert was at his side with a small notebook and several long strips of paper, of the kind used to monitor earthquakes and heartbeats.

  “Sir, you see these lines?” Lieutenant Tucker asked, drawing his finger across a sheet that was trying to flap away in the wind.

  Christian nodded.

  “They’re the last navigation pings we received from whatever kind of boat our side sent in to extract the MacCready and Nesbitt crews.”

  “Meaning, the Russians found them?”

  “I don’t think that’s what happened. The sonar pings are too many hours old—and most of them look like decoy buoys. And if the extraction boat got careless, my Argo guys would have noticed them before the Russians did.” Tucker folded the papers into a satchel. “So,” he emphasized, “I don’t think they were firing on our guys.”

  “Then, who?”

  “Uhh—that’s the sixty-four-dollar question.” Tucker began to carefully unscroll a new sheet from his satchel. “I found something strange in these figures,” he said, pointing. “Almost like a shadow moving past the old pings and two miles south of Santorini’s lower west side. Argo team says it looks like a cloud in the water. And we might not have noticed it at all if it wasn’t sometimes such a noisy cloud.”

  “They’re bombing a cloud?”

  “Seems so, Captain. My idea was that it’s a school of big fish but they’d have to be pretty weird fish. I mean, only just a little denser than the water itself. But then there’s that question: Why would they be bombing fish? Now—that extraction boat, sir? I’ve got to ask.”

  “Go on.”

  “It’s underwater, right? That’s what my graphs here are making me think. There’s nothing of ours on the surface in that area. I’m thinking the Russians smell something in the area and are shooting at anything that looks in any way like it might not belong—even if it’s just some fish making noises they’ve never heard before.”

  The captain began to appreciate the strategic significance of having “borrowed” the reluctantly reactivated Lieutenant Tucker from Hollywood. During the past year, between supporting roles for Columbia Pictures, Tucker had been working with actress/inventor Hedy Lamarr to enhance the resolution of sonar
devices—including the secret abilities of the “research vessel” Argo. The hard-drinking lieutenant was notoriously rowdy but every bit the inquisitive and brilliant man Hedy had promised he would be.

  “Should I be looking for a submarine—one of ours?” the lieutenant pressed.

  “I can’t tell you what they’ve sent for MacCready, Tucker, because even I don’t know.”

  “Then if the sub is hit, and gone, we’re the rescue mission. Someone would have to be awfully concerned to send in our sort of backup.”

  The captain shrugged and bit off the end of a cigar. Instead of spitting it out, he chewed vigorously. I propose no revisions to a mission objective along the path you have chosen, he had written.

  “We’re still under MacArthur’s command,” Christian said. “And I may be asking more from this crew than you signed on for.”

  “The prisoners?”

  “Yes. According to the general, there are at least three of our people out there who know too much, and who cannot be risked to Russian torture. If the extraction team goes missing, or fails, our mission goes from rescue support to silencing.”

  “MacArthur’s protocol?”

  “No. It’s Nesbitt’s protocol. I hear she lost three teeth in the Himalayas—something called Operation Mammoth-jump. So, just in case she ever got into this kind of mess, she volunteered to have some experimental bridge work put into her mouth: a miniature transmitter with enough power to send out radio beeps that can be picked up from twenty miles away. If it becomes necessary, she’s willing to activate the thing, calling in the planes that will kill her along with anyone else who happens to be near—and especially her interrogators.”

  “That’s some dame,” Tucker said.

  The captain swallowed hard and asked, “Anything else for me, in your squiggly papers?”

  “That’s the other sixty-four-dollar question.”

  “And?”

  “That shadow—the school of strange fish the Russians are so trigger-happy about—well, one of those underwater clouds is moving into our path. We should be passing practically through it in about twenty minutes.”

  July 10, 1948

  Dmitri’s Overlook

  Santorini

  The water was still white where the shells from the Kursk had struck.

  Even at a distance, Mac could see a pair of stunned or dying Kraken writhing in the foam.

  “I know your friend Yanni really cares about those things,” Dmitri said. “I’m sorry it has to be this way.”

  “I’m sorry too,” Mac said. He was reminded of something Japan’s Admiral Yamamoto had written during the weeks following the attack on Pearl Harbor—which he had evaluated as “a small success . . . that shall give us much trouble in the future.”

  “I fear,” the scientist said, as one of the injured creatures slid beneath the surface, “that you are awakening a sleeping dragon.”

  “I don’t believe so,” the Russian said. But a grave expression passed suddenly across his face and he admitted, “I don’t know.”

  “That’s the problem with hope.”

  “Yes, Captain MacCready. The problem is that we never really know. And if we did know, how many of us would bother to show up in the first place?”

  “Yeah—well, during the last few minutes I think I’ve watched a couple more of those ‘dragons’ dying. So what I do know is that this would be a good time to keep your eyes and carotid arteries out of Yanni’s reach.”

  Dmitri was momentarily distracted by two jets approaching at high altitude. But Mac acted as if he did not notice; his attention was narrowing on something nearer to earth, on the horizon, below the clouds. Mac pointed with his cuffed hands, and when Dmitri looked where the American was pointing, he drew his breath in astonishment. As the minutes passed, the dark shape on the sea’s horizon resolved itself into an aircraft carrier, flanked on either side by escort ships.

  Mac nodded toward the Kursk and a pair of Soviet jets circling back out over deep water. “You called checkmate on me?” he said, as five Grumman Hellcats left the flattop, one after another, and began circling ominously around their approaching carrier. “Nah! That’s what I call checkmate.”

  July 10, 1948

  In Russian-Dominated Skies

  Santorini Protectorate

  “What was that?” Valentina suddenly cried, breaking radio silence. She pitched her plane hard to port and dropped from thirty thousand feet to twenty-five thousand, trying to acquire a clearer fix on the large object that had just appeared on the dark sea, between islands of white clouds.

  “I’m seeing two—no, make that four Hellcats orbiting her. Repeat, four Hellcats.”

  “I see a fifth, and there may be more,” Andrei called from the other plane. “Want to test them?”

  “Nyet!” commanded Valentina. “Maintain nonbelligerency.” For any Americans who might be listening, she repeated it in English and added, “We’re coming in for a look.”

  July 10, 1948

  Aboard Captain Christian’s Command

  Aircraft Carrier Intrepid, the “Fighting I”

  For a while, Chief Engineer Tom McAvinue Scott was happy to be away from the white hell of Antarctica and cruising in the warm waters of the Mediterranean. But now, of course, life aboard Intrepid was de-evolving from mere training missions against Russian antagonists to actually being antagonized by two Russian jets descending. Anyone attacking a war-hardened aircraft carrier had to be foolish. But to attack a carrier from the country that holds the monopoly on atom bombs would make one heir to the king of fools, Tom concluded—unless the monopoly really has a much shorter life span than we thought, and the worst kind of showdown is only a step away.

  Biblical images came quickly to mind: men and women falling with their tongues and eyes burned from their skulls before they touched the ground . . . cities going up like the smoke of a furnace . . .

  He was relieved to hear Captain Christian calling over the intercom for gunners to take aim and stay alert but to hold fire. “Repeat. Repeat,” the speakers blazed clearly. “Stand down unless fired upon, or unless directly ordered to fire.”

  The ship’s engines were coming down to “all ahead slow”; Tom could feel it through the flattop deck. Three brand-new Hellcats were being readied for flight nearby, as the growls from the jets became more distinct. He looked up at the clouds, searching, but Lieutenant Tucker suddenly called out—“What the fuuuck!”—louder and even more alarming than the growls in the sky. “Look out!”

  When Tom looked down from the clouds, he saw Tucker rushing toward him, but the lieutenant and the deck before him were completely distorted, as if some odd new form of carnival glass had popped up between them. The engineer understood immediately that it could not be glass, and in only a second he realized that there were at least three sheets of the “glass”—and they were in motion, and one of them had eyes.

  Tom was certain that he would have died where he stood if some fast-thinking crewman had not sprayed the imitation “carnival glass” with fuel. The nearest “sheet” was only fifteen feet away when Tucker lit it up. Its skin blackened instantly, and the “glass” transformed into a Hydra with flailing serpent heads.

  The engineer would recall later that the creature was hideous, and yet somehow, at the same moment, there was something dreadfully beautiful about it. For several seconds, the sight of it held him rooted to the spot—until one of the tentacles splashed his entire right arm, from wrist to shoulder and up the side of his neck, with burning fuel. He dropped to the deck and rolled, trying to smother the flames—and he had almost succeeded when his left leg got splashed and also began to burn.

  Lieutenant Tucker was quickly at Tom’s side, clutching his left arm by the wrist and trying to drag him away from the angry, burning masses of cephalopod flesh. But Tom’s leg was beginning to burn deep and he reached down with his sizzling free hand and tried to put out the flames.

  “Oh—God, I’m burning up! Damn it! I’m on fire!
Fire!”

  Tom discovered too late that they must have heard him on the other side of the Intrepid’s island stack. Sometimes all that was necessary to create a swerve of history was for a single gunner to misunderstand and react a second too quickly—while knowing that a mere second’s hesitation could bring death raining down upon hundreds of his fellow seamen—if he did not track the Russian jet and stand ready to pull the trigger the instant he heard the call to fire. The response of the other gunners to one man’s burst of gunfire was a chain reaction.

  The sky lit up with tracer rounds. Tom did not see the creatures fleeing over the port side, and he was only vaguely aware of men throwing fire blankets over him, and of shock beginning to take over. All he could think about was the sky, and the jets in it. Oh my God! I’ve just started a war with Russia, he told himself. And then his Irish sense of gallows humor kicked in. Oh, to think my department chair at Columbia said I’d never accomplish anything significant.

  July 10, 1948

  In Russian-Dominated Skies

  Santorini Protectorate

  Valentina leveled out just above the clouds and was preparing to circle around for reconnaissance when Andrei confirmed that they had optimal amounts of fuel remaining. She banked east and the Fighting I was coming easily into view—with Valentina’s cameras rolling—and then, from more than six thousand feet below, tracer fire began to fill her sky.

  Valentina punched her set of still-experimental afterburners up to full power and used all of her thrust-vector capability to scoot horizontally as the storm of lead and sparks fell suddenly behind the gunners’ tracking abilities. She would have thrown her head back in triumph if the G-forces had not already done so for her. Valentina knew she was going to live, at least for a little while, thanks to well-honed flying skills combined with the great good fortune that the gunners below seemed never to have trained against this maneuver. The tracer fire suddenly died away, as if each gunner had instantly run through his “whole nine yards” of ammunition in a moment of panic.