by Bill Schutt
An hour after that, a dozen more Russian agents were homeward bound from New York, in exchange for Nora Nesbitt.
Again Cousteau was offered his freedom and again he insisted on remaining behind.
“Damn you, Jacques—you should have gone when you had the chance.”
“You are part of my crew, as I see it. And I will not leave while even one of you is still here.”
“Thanks for the thought,” Yanni said. “But this isn’t exactly a sinking ship, Cap’.”
Mac was not so sure of that. After the 4:20 a.m. helicopter lift-off, the suddenness with which the three remaining prisoners had been marched out of the base-camp ruin and down to a secluded cove could have meant only one thing: once Nesbitt was safely landed aboard the Intrepid, their luck ran out. Something, Mac supposed, had snagged the very last exchange negotiation in Washington.
Either that, or we’re just not important enough for Team Washington to worry their little heads about.
Under cover of morning twilight, they had been hurried aboard a launch disquietingly similar to the one Mac and Yanni saw destroyed only six days before. This time the Russians were taking no chances. The launch followed an escort boat that hosed poisons into the water.
Now they stood handcuffed under heavy guard, among the jagged, reddish-black boulders of Nea Kameni’s eastern shore. One could easily imagine that the surface of the moon looked something like this. Even where the sea, over dozens of centuries, had hewn solidified lava down into gravel and mineral-rich sand, nothing grew. Unlike most volcanic islands, “the New Burnt Land” failed to be colonized by birds, trees, insects, or even weeds. Surrounded by sea life, the islet was among the deadest places on earth. Mac hoped this biological anomaly would be enough to keep the Kraken away, at least until (oh—another oh-so-cheery thought) they were safely transferred to one of the floating gulags in the lagoon’s north.
The Russians had plenty of poison but were clearly reluctant to drive into the red volcanic springs and spray the creatures that tended to congregate there, guarding the plumes. The “red miracle” was known to be biological, so Mac was not surprised to observe a certain degree of caution against poisoning the goose that lays the golden egg. He reasoned that if Dmitri had been around these island fragments long enough to acquire at least one or two good samples, they must have been burned or lost during the previous night’s battle. Why else, he wondered, would their ships still be prowling the lagoon, at such risk?
Looking up, Mac saw a glint of metal and two contrails forming behind them, in absolute silence.
“More Russians,” Cousteau said.
“Yes. Two more jets—at about twenty-five thousand feet.”
As if in response, three brand-new Grumman Hellcats buzzed Nea Kameni, at no more than five hundred feet. By the time they rounded Therasia, buzzed the Kursk, and turned toward Fira, Dmitri was scrambling down from the direction of a dormant cinder cone.
“What the hell are your people doing?” the Russian demanded.
“How should we know?” Yanni answered. “You see us with a radio here?”
Mac looked north across the lagoon and saw that the Kursk and a support vessel had begun steaming toward them. He looked at Dmitri quizzically.
“Time’s running out,” Dmitri said. “One of your carrier’s escort ships is parked outside the west inlet.” He nodded toward a Russian ship armed with detergent, Drano, and nozzles. “But as you see, we have more experience than your people at puzzling out how to keep the Kraken from coming aboard.”
Scarcely four miles away, one side of the Kursk’s hull was already being sprayed.
“Strange animals,” Dmitri continued. “Last night, that escort tanker sprayed five of them and before they were all dead, about five or ten more of the beasts came rushing into the poison. It’s as if they crave death.”
“How can you so completely misunderstand what they were doing?” said Yanni. “These are not mindless beasts. Rescue. Got it? The lives of their own are precious to them. They are a lot like us. Maybe—maybe they’re better than us.”
At the same moment Yanni was explaining to Dmitri what she believed humanity had really awakened, the clock was touching midnight in Washington. A dangerous web was being unraveled, and it was moving the president to the edge of depression. The coin-boy incident had revealed a chain of command that led to infiltrators at Los Alamos and beyond. Hendry’s and Bobby’s people were still following the chain, breaking it and gathering new information as they went along. The news was, as Hendry had summed it up, “definitely ungood.”
If only I could have ended up anywhere but here, Truman told himself. If only I could have remained a simple businessman, in total ignorance of what’s approaching, with just a few quiet years ahead, teaching my daughter how to play the piano.
Wishing it were somehow possible to go backward in time, and erase knowledge, President Truman returned a telephone receiver to its cradle, then shook his head, very slowly.
“Let Hendry take a team in there,” Bobby pleaded.
“That’s out of the question right now. He’s been waiting to hop a plane out of Bethpage but now your guy Rubenstein’s revelations mean it’s too late for a new op to be of any help.”
“My guy. Yes. Maybe Rubenstein is trying to make a name for himself. And maybe he was a little overzealous, but—”
“I understand,” Truman said. “Necessary evil. We had to know. We had to verify.”
Bobby shook his head for the third time in as many minutes. “I hope I never have to live through a night like this again.” He took a swallow of coffee. “So that’s it? That quickly?”
Truman wished it were not so. “We can’t give that Los Alamos duo back to Stalin,” he said. “We need to find out exactly how his people did it—how Russian scientists got so close, so fast, to making their own A-bomb.”
“Leaving us now with less than a year! It’s still hard to believe.”
“That’s not even for your friend McCarthy to hear, though it’s a fair bet the whole world will know soon enough. They’ve already built their goddamned thing. Now it’s just a matter of waiting for them to test-explode it.”
“We were supposed to have at least another five years. How could no one have seen this coming?”
“Some did,” the president said. “Einstein and von Braun’s committee saw it but I really didn’t believe them. Now I’m wondering if they were right about a lot of other creepy things.”
“Such as?”
“Nuclear proliferation. Nuclear showdowns. Something they call the population bomb—double the number of people we have by 1990—then another doubling, more quickly next time. And after all the seas are strip-mined of their fish, a great humanitarian crisis—and all of this beginning during the lifetimes of your children. And they think that by then it’ll be more than a dozen countries armed to the teeth with A-bombs.”
“They could be wrong, you know?”
“They’d better be, Bobby! It used to be drunks or prophets or people in mental institutions who warned us about the end of days. But this time it’s coming from those sane and sober men with the slide rules.”
“They could still be wrong,” Bobby said.
“They’d better be,” the president said again. “Did you know that I once threw the leading scientist on the Manhattan Project out of this office?”
“Oppenheimer? Really? What did he do?”
“Nothing, really. And at the same time, maybe everything. He told me that science—with all these brave new weapons coming out of the labs—was finally discovering the unforgivable sin.”
Bobby said nothing. He added two more sugar cubes to his coffee, sipped quietly, and winced as if it still tasted too bitter.
The president pushed a large white envelope across the desk. “You might as well have a read of it, before you leave. A great human change, they say.”
“And now the biologists are sniffing around Santorini.” Bobby hefted the envelope. “And
the Russians have the A-bomb.”
“I’m sorry that you and your children will be in the middle of it.” Truman looked out the window. The bright lights along the White House lawn cast multiple shadows from each of the cherry trees. Their growth had been impressive these past three years. “Cherry pie,” he said wistfully.
“What?”
“I was thinking of Oppenheimer—and about the Atomic Bombing Survey. He interviewed a child whose entire schoolhouse flew apart, killing almost everyone inside but leaving that one girl completely uninjured. The kid remembered seeing all the cherry trees along the river blossoming the previous spring. She remembered the smell of cherry sap. And she saw the orchards of Hiroshima aflame.”
Bobby looked at him sympathetically. “You need to forget about that.”
The president shook his head, very stubbornly. “She said it smelled like cherry pie.”
July 11, 1948
7:10 a.m.
South of Santorini
“How’s that for your ultimate weapon?” said Elija. They were poisoned, all four of the NR-3’s engine crew; but Elija was the only one who up until now had not been feeling sick. With the seal now open between the reactor room and the cockpit compartment, the radiation aft was diluted ever so slightly by the greater volume of air, but their situation remained “Look for me tomorrow and you shall find me a very grave man.”
Elija hung his head in his hands and tried to distract himself from his first sudden onset of chills. A very tired young engineer named Thomas provided a much-appreciated shift of focus from what he knew was coming: One minute you’re fine. Then you feel sick. A minute after that, you really are sick.
Thomas held out a decoded text. “This one’s in reply to our music boxes—from the captain of the Intrepid. Looks like a change of plan.”
The signal read: “Raccoon-drop primaries being wined and dined in Presidential Suite. Come to my Eye. Don’t stub your big toe.”
“What the hell’s he getting at?” said Thomas. He was having some difficulty staying on his feet, so the signal seemed more cryptic to him than it should have.
Elija stared at him apologetically. “‘My eye,’ means the Intrepid. They appear to have already completed the rescue—at least the major part of it. President Truman knows about us. We’re being asked not to sink ourselves in deep water but go to the carrier and prepare to take towlines.”
Thomas looked at his acting captain hopefully. “So, we may live through this after all.”
“We’re not necessarily lethal yet. If we get there in the next couple of hours and go through a thorough hose-down, we may have a good chance.”
“Might work,” another engineer said hopefully. “Ever since Bikini Atoll, our carriers have been prepped to handle radiation injuries—including Dr. Nagai’s ideas about regenerative cells stored in newborns’ umbilical cords. The Navy’s been stocking and freezing those. Best experimental medicine in the world is being done aboard carriers.”
“Yes,” said Elija. “It’s imperative that we pull anchor and get on board the ‘Eye’ as soon—”
The seabed under the NR-3’s treads shook. Elija knew immediately that this time the sub was not being shaken by a blast or by another large cephalopod. Confidence was high that the Russians did not know where they were, or even that the sub existed. As for the cephalopods, the same vapors of heavy metal that were poisoning the crew and being pumped outside seemed to be keeping the beasts at a distance.
This time the sea itself had lurched.
Elija prepared for pump-up to positive buoyancy, looked outside, and gasped.
“Now what?”
July 11, 1948
7:12 a.m.
Nea Kameni
“Péter un plomb?” Cousteau muttered.
For all that was happening around them, Mac could not hold back a grin. The French did not ask if someone was “going crazy.” To them a crazy man was said to have “broken a fuse” in his head.
This seemed an apt description for the Hellcat pilot who, while likely “going off the reservation” and with no order to do so, had dove his plane down to hilltop altitude, fired warning shots across the bow of a Russian ship, then dropped a bomb nearby. For a second, all of Nea Kameni shook—and not just from the explosion. The magma pool beneath the lagoon seemed to be acting in reply to the bomb. The earth shook again, harder this time, and for at least five full seconds—as if in warning.
Two more Hellcats buzzed directly overhead. Both circled back, made another close approach, then hurried south, waggling their wings.
Yanni looked north and pointed out a Russian jet descending. “Péter un plomb, for sure! How many fuses are they planning on breaking today?”
“Damned if I know,” Mac replied. “Damned if I know.”
July 11, 1948
South of Santorini
Depth, 230 Feet
The avalanche had mostly bypassed the NR-3, but the underwater landscape ahead became so unrecognizable that the old charts now seemed useless. A layer of silt hung two feet off the seafloor. Here and there, streamers of carbon dioxide and methane were bubbling up from somewhere far below. Except for vertical wisps of silt that trailed the bubbles toward the surface, the water was surprisingly clear.
The ancient stonework where they had placed the sono-buoys was gone, and in its place the rubble of an entire port had appeared: amphorae, the contents of warehouses and guesthouses—even an ornate terra-cotta bathtub. Before them, nearly half of a Bronze Age trireme lay amid up-thrust debris. The ship’s freshly exposed wood and cargo were so amazingly intact that Elija immediately forgot the aches that had begun gnawing at his bones like a thousand little rat’s teeth.
Gold glinted under NR-3’s lamps. Even through the veil of grayish silt-mist, they saw gold everywhere amid the remains of the cross-sectioned ship.
“Looks like Eighteenth Dynasty,” said Thomas, clearly excited to a point of forgetting his own aches and pains. “I’m guessing somewhere between the time of Hatshepsut and Tut.”
“The wood looks like it’s been partly burned,” said Elija. He moved in closer, unlocking the sub’s robot arm.
“A dock fire, you think?”
“Maybe the volcano. Who knows?” Most of the golden glimmer appeared to be concentrated around a shattered and partly melted sarcophagus that in terms of sheer beauty must once have rivaled the jewel-encrusted coffin of the child-king popularly known as “Tut.” But this coffin was built for someone very robust, very tall. And instead of being decorated with Egyptian serpents and falcons, two marine animals were represented: a leviathan and a cephalopod. As he swept away charred and waterlogged wood, Elija began to believe the object more resembled a suit of armor than a coffin. The entire head came loose at the slightest touch of the robot arm. A masterpiece of thick gold and lapis inlay, the headpiece itself was the only nonmarine animal depicted.
“That could be either Egypt or Crete,” said Thomas. “The sacred bull.”
As Elija tried to secure the artifact—a king’s Egyptian death mask?—splinters of bone began to avalanche out from the rest of the armor. They looked like pieces of a human skeleton and the rotted remnants of a beef stew mixed together. “Now, Thomas, why would a man and a bull share the same coffin?”
Before he could answer, another tremor threatened more avalanches. There was little time to waste, even if not for the possibility of the sub being marooned in the next surge of silt and debris.
Elija wished he could toss away some of the Russian papers that filled the sample basket and make room for this new treasure. But the documents from the Koresh were a higher priority. So he pushed the golden bull’s head against the top of the tray, locking down the robot arm with such force that one of the figure’s ivory horns broke off. But the lockdown was secure, and Elija managed to keep the neck facing up, like the mouth of a jug. He hoped more of the strange bones lay inside the headpiece, and did not wish to spill out any of them. The scientists will want to see this.<
br />
They marked the position as best they could and ascended within ten feet of the surface. Radio signals were now coming in loud and clear, in three languages. Only one of them seemed really to matter:
MOUNT ELIAS, MOUNT ELIAS. ARE YOU RECEIVING? THIS IS THE EYE. PREP FOR NEW ORDERS. REPEAT. PREP FOR NEW ORDERS.
July 11, 1948
9:00 a.m.
Under American-Dominated Skies
Santorini Protectorate, Islet of Nea Kameni
The aerial grandstanding seemed to have gone on forever. Even without the added stress of near misses overhead, thirst would still have been tearing at MacCready’s throat. The peak of what promised to be another oppressive July afternoon was nearly four hours off, but already it was coming at them like a freight train. Today there was not even the whisper of a breeze, and the dark rocks of Nea Kameni’s easternmost shore caught the rays of the sun and threw its heat back at the captives.
The dangerous farce of “playing chicken” in the sky could easily have ended in metal raining down upon the rocks—and it surely would have, if not for the skills of the pilots on both sides. Eventually the Russian jets ran low on fuel and headed north, but that provided only a brief respite.
The Kursk and its escorts had been approaching from Therasia scarcely faster than canoes. They were now poised only a quarter mile east of the red plumes, and were still occasionally spraying at something in the water, either real or imagined.
How long will it be till they run out of Kraken repellant? Mac wondered. As if in reply, the “spray boat” that had escorted their “prisoner transport” left the Nea Kameni shore and moved toward the plumes. Doubtless to provide backup for one of the support tankers, Mac thought. One of the tankers suddenly picked up speed and likewise steamed directly toward the plumes.
“I know exactly what you’re thinking,” Dmitri said, holstering his walkie-talkie. “But you should make a prayer for those ships, Captain MacCready, because you’re all going aboard. There’s a scientist who wants to make an acquaintance with you . . . after he gets his samples.” He paused and glanced south. Across the water, a helicopter was passing over the ruins of the Akrotiri base camp—approaching from the direction of Intrepid.
