The Darwin Strain

by Bill Schutt

  The earth shook again, hard enough to knock people over like bowling pins. When he hit the ground, one of the black rocks cut a gash along Mac’s forehead.

  “They’re no use to us dead,” Dmitri called out, and ordered the prisoners’ hands uncuffed, to give them at least a reasonable chance of holding their balance against the grumblings of Nea Kameni.

  The submariner then motioned for two commandos to usher Yanni uphill with him. “I’m going to need her at my overlook on the plumes and their Kraken guardians. But don’t worry, MacCready. I can guarantee her safety.”

  As indeed he needs to, Mac thought. Whether or not kindness had anything to do with Dmitri’s actions, he knew it was logical for the Russian to keep Yanni safe. No one besides her was better able to look down upon the lagoon and interpret every hint of where the Kraken were, and what they were doing.

  Not that she’s going to tell him the truth, Mac assured himself.

  The Intrepid’s helicopter passed overhead, circled once, then made a beeline toward the Kursk. It buzzed the antennae and radar mast at such low altitude that had a crosswind struck, or had the pilot misjudged within a range of only two feet, pieces of rotor blades would have gone flying like guillotines into the ship’s bridge and across its deck.

  Mac shook his head. Much more of this today and someone’s bound to screw up badly.

  “They break a fuse!” Cousteau said.

  “Exactly what I was thinking.”

  A pair of new and fully fueled Russian jets began circling the island—and a new swarm of Hellcats was already aloft before they arrived.

  Dmitri and Yanni stopped climbing for a moment and looked around. Mac saw Yanni glance down at him, and he knew from the expression on her face that they were both having very much the same thought, as one of the Hellcats lost control in the slipstream of a Soviet jet: Tell me this isn’t the worst case of testosterone poisoning you’ve ever seen.

  The Hellcat dove below the cliffs of Fira Quarry halfway into a fatal spin and did not recover until it was within only two hundred feet of crashing into the lagoon. No one had ever observed a plane tipping and weaving in the vortex of a jet’s wings before. It held Mac’s attention for so many seconds that he did not notice the approach of a much larger plane until it was well within the boundaries of the lagoon—a B-17 Flying Fortress, coming in low and fast.

  A second B-17 rounded the island fragment of Therasia in the north, flying below cliff-top altitude.

  “What on earth?”

  They had both been painted white, and their tails bore a hastily drawn copy of the insignia Mac had seen on Bishop Marinatos’s helicopter.

  “What did the bishop do?” Mac wondered aloud. “Did he go all the way up to the pope of the Greek Orthodox Church and get permission to send bombers after us?”

  “I thought they were supposed to be nonviolent,” Cousteau said, his voice on the very edge of being drowned out by engine noise.

  “I’ve seen Alan kill, when he has to—and he’s a Buddhist!”

  “I asked him about that, with regard to Hata.”

  “And?”

  “He said, ‘I told you I’m a Buddhist. I never said I was a good Buddhist!’”

  Mac did not hear this. The first plane was too near, and too loud—and it was dropping depth charges. The entire load followed a perfect arc over the masts of the Russian ships, directly into the red plumes.

  Whatever instructions the Greeks had ferreted out of ancient prophetic texts, the bishop and his friends had evidently considered these against every clue revealed by Cousteau and anyone else who had been near the volcanic springs. The charges did not detonate until they went deep, no doubt calibrated to fall near and among the velvety red mats, on rock bottom. The second plane dropped its bombs along a more widely dispersed path—half of them missing the plumes and trailing all the way ashore and up to the volcanic cone.

  The explosions felt like an insignificant series of guttural thuds, compared with what they could do. Awakened by human violence, nature responded—instantly—with violence of her own. Rocks and black dust laced with steam shot out of Nea Kameni’s cinder cone in an up-rushing column that expanded hideously, drawing a curtain of smoke over the Kursk and its escorts.

  Seconds before the veils of dust and ash hid the ships, Mac saw the sea itself exploding. Thick, oily billows rose from the place where the red plumes had been. The water in that direction boiled strangely, turning from red to black. Several Kraken floated to the surface, bleaching and dying amid the black geysers.

  Overhead, the cloud from the volcano towered like a giant umbrella pine—at least five thousand feet tall and branching out. Mac realized that this was what Pliny the Elder must have seen, just before Pompeii disappeared from Roman maps.

  “Yanni!”

  Suddenly the whole earth seemed to be quaking and disintegrating. One of Mac and Cousteau’s Russian guards disappeared beneath a dislodged boulder and another made a heroic but hopeless attempt to save the man. The rest chased after Mac as he scrabbled, stumbled, and leaped uphill toward an ever-widening chain of cracks that seemed to be spreading before him.

  “Mac!” It was Yanni’s voice. She was on the other side of the cracks—which were joining now to create a wider fissure. She called again through the terrestrial din and tried to make a run toward him, but Dmitri grabbed her forcefully by the wrist and cuffed her to himself.

  The roar from the earth diminished to a low growl and through shifting sheets of hot mist, Mac watched a curious expression pass across Yanni’s face—as if she had seen all of this before, and knew exactly what was about to happen.

  One of the commandos reached him and was about to cuff him but Mac’s reflexes were ever so slightly quicker and so he managed to pull away and wave. “Hey, Yanni.”

  “Mac . . .”

  Up ahead, the fissure that separated them widened to more than thirty feet, then more than forty. Slowly, gracefully, and with surprisingly little noise—with the ease of a ship casting off from a pier—the slab of Nea Kameni on which Mac and Cousteau stood slid eastward.

  “Mac, I—”

  The ground dropped like an express elevator—twenty feet below sea level. All around, shock fronts forced back the sea. For what seemed like two full seconds, perhaps three or four, walls of water hovered at the edges, reminding Mac of that scene from the Bible when Moses parted the Red Sea. But today there was no such magic, and after only a few astonishing seconds of hovering, the sea closed in with a vengeance.

  With uncanny rapidity, numbers were running through Cousteau’s head. The walls of water were twenty feet high and were tumbling toward him as what were called “Hail Mary waves.” An emergency ascent would be reasonably easy if he did not get smashed against rocks, with point-source impacts exceeding a thousand pounds per square inch. He immediately scrambled up the tallest nearby rock, realizing that he would be struck first by the wall in the north and could set himself up intentionally to be flung laterally, with the lowest probability of being dashed against any of the hundreds of shorter rocks.

  “Do what I’m doing if you want to live!” he called out to the commandos.

  In those seconds, he even had time to hyperventilate and begin oxygenating his blood enough for an extra edge in favor of survival, but his calculation of the pressures involved told him that he must not try to hold his breath. Far better to let the sea, as it crashed against him from at least two directions, catch him exhaling. The numbers told Cousteau that to do otherwise was to invite some hellish risks: air compressing out through the sides of the esophagus into the muscles of the neck . . . eyes blown out through their sockets.

  Oh, no, no, no—butterfly says no!—as his little boy Philippe would have phrased it.

  The north wave swept him off the rock before he could call this final safety tip out to the Russians. In the next second, as expected, it became impossible to tell up from down. Cousteau had time enough to hope that Mac had made the same calculations and t
aken the same precautions, before the north wave crashed him into the south wave.

  Mac surfaced into waters white with seafoam. Two Hellcats overflew him within pea-shooter range. Mac ignored them. He looked first toward Nea Kameni. Only two figures still moved there. Dmitri was leading Yanni away into unpredictable storms of dust. One of the Russian ships appeared to have spotted Dmitri. It weaved effortlessly in and out of the volcanic clouds. Only after Yanni and the ship vanished into the smoke did MacCready notice Cousteau treading nearby.

  “Looks like we’ve survived the worst the island can throw at us,” Cousteau said. “Until next time.”

  Mac gave him a quick nod and began swimming immediately toward the freshly chiseled rock face of Nea Kameni’s east shore.

  The French agent shouted behind him. “Not that way—stop—listen!”

  He paused, and listened, and his attention was drawn immediately past Cousteau toward the cliffs of Santorini. The waves they just survived had rippled out from the avalanching mass of rock and were now crashing along the inner rim of the island crescent—here and there launching vertical jets of white sea spray from the shore. The curved, lagoon-facing coastline of Santorini was reflecting the waves whence they came, the way a parabolic mirror reflects and focuses light.

  “You did not let me finish!” Cousteau warned. “The next time has already begun.”

  “But Yanni!”

  “Yanni does not want you to commit suicide. Swim toward those rocks and the wave will fly-swat you against them.”

  “I’ve got to try.”

  “There won’t be a piece of you big enough to feed a shrimp.”

  Even as a sudden current began drawing him away from Nea Kameni and toward the approaching waves—even in a moment of shocked acceptance that he now had no more power to swim against it than a cork in a tsunami—Mac’s first concern was for Yanni.

  He could see no trace of her, and the current was presently sweeping him away. Pumice stone floated in from the west—moving along with him in great yellow rafts.

  “Swim with the current,” Cousteau said, over a strengthening roar. “And hope it takes us to deep water fast!”

  The reflection wave front was only about a mile away, barely visible as a greenish-blue line. Bearing down on Nea Kameni’s east tip, it rose in frightful majesty. The wave tried to crest, then stumbled and collapsed into foaming white rapids. Up ahead, Jacques Cousteau, showing all the confidence of an Olympic athlete about to cross the finish line, moved with a sudden burst of power directly toward the wave and at the last instant dove right beneath it.

  Mac copied the maneuver and once again was tumbled by multiple clashing vortexes that made it impossible to tell up from down. This time, as the roaring in his ears subsided, he was able to see light in one direction, and swam toward it.

  His ears detected other sounds—carrying through the water from a distance that was difficult to determine: the clash of rocks. And hidden within the noise of the earth itself, the propellers of at least two ships, and the snap-and-click of angry Kraken.

  How near are they? he wondered. According to Yanni, their communications were quite complex but right now, for Mac, breaking the code seemed childishly simple: It’s the kind of sound I’d expect if we’d just pissed into a beehive.

  When Mac broke the surface, Cousteau was twenty feet away and already swimming toward him.

  “We have company,” Mac warned.

  “I know,” said the Frenchman. He stopped to tread water and pointed east. The NR-3’s conning tower was rising, heading toward them at top speed. Within forty seconds she had slowed to full stop and two men on the prow were grabbing at them and pulling them aboard.

  “You have to come below right now,” Elija commanded. “The next surge will be weaker but we still want to be submerged when it arrives.”

  “Wasn’t expecting to get you without shooting a whole lot of Russians,” one of the rescuers said, pushing Cousteau down the hatch. He glanced up at the mile-high volcanic cloud, “but they say stuff just has a way of blowing up around you, huh?”

  “Have you heard about the cephalopods?” Mac asked. “The big ones?”

  “Met them,” Elija said. “Unfortunately, we’ve got a little secret that keeps them away.”

  “Unfortunately?”

  “Yeah. Either way, we’re just about done in.”

  Despite the addition of another five rads, Elija’s crew elected to stay behind for thirty minutes more, surfacing to periscope depth after the next wave front passed and searching Nea Kameni for Yanni and Dmitri. There were no signs of any human forms, dead or alive. The man at the flight engineer’s seat detected the Russian ships racing away in multiple directions, at more than twice the NR-3’s maximum cruising speed.

  The eruption sputtered, stalled, and began to slow down, but it continued to give the Russians everything they needed—a smoke screen of aluminum-rich volcanic dust that was playing havoc with radar. This time Hellcats were unable to spot the positions of ships, much less prisoner and captor. To fly into the dust clouds and gum up the engines was meaningless death, because there was no way of seeing more than twenty or thirty feet beyond the nose of the plane. Even under the sea, the falling ash was dense enough to complicate the interpretation of sonar.

  At every opportunity, through every clearing in the ash clouds, Mac searched the shores of Nea Kameni. He prayed an agnostic’s prayer (if you’re there . . . ) against the possibility of sighting dust-covered bodies. They saw none. Presumably, the Russians had Yanni.

  Elija cautioned Mac and Cousteau that even with the Intrepid moving toward rendezvous outside the nearest inlet, they would all be taking another twenty rads before anyone was safely aboard and showering.

  Twenty or twenty-five rads was close to normal for a lifetime dose from nature. Though Mac knew he and Cousteau—newly exposed to the sub’s contaminated interior—could easily take that amount of radiation and probably not suffer from it, what mattered most was the rapidity with which one took those first three or four hundred rads. To keep the engineers absorbing even a few more rads, at this point in their exposure, would drive them toward depressingly diminished odds of survival.

  “The Russians have her,” Mac told Cousteau and the others. “She has to be alive. Has to be.”

  The waves had by now lost all of their strength and the cinder cone was also waning fast. The spectacle was still impressive, but no longer evoking images of Pompeii and Krakatoa. The lagoon was calming down and the engineers needed to be brought out of the radiation as soon as possible. All agreed that they should not provoke the fates any longer.

  The shock was all the more startling, therefore, when the sea itself exploded as they sailed past the westernmost tip of Nea Kameni. Not more than a half mile astern, fountains of black steam shot sixty, eighty—a hundred stories into the sky, obliterating whatever might still have remained of the red plumes.

  There were Kraken along the nearer fringe of the eruption—many of them still writhing but certainly no more alive than the severed tentacle Yanni had found aboard the Russian “fishing trawler.”

  Two hundred yards nearer, a type of Kraken larger than any Mac had seen before surfaced and began swimming in erratic circles. Through the periscope, Mac saw that one of its eyes appeared to be burned and unseeing. It was not alone. Smaller Kraken were moving in from cooler, more distant, and safer waters to join their brethren—more and more of them, pulling and tugging at their dead and their still-moving dead.

  Mac stepped away and turned one of the sub’s two periscopes over to Cousteau, who scanned the lagoon in astonishment.

  “What do you see?” Mac asked him.

  “A race that has been around probably as long as we have. And today, I think, we are witnessing the end of their world.” The Frenchman watched until the NR-3 was outside the lagoon and neither the Kraken nor the base of the geyser could be seen any longer. When Cousteau handed the scope over, Mac searched the land for people. He searche
d the horizon for ships but he did not look in the direction of the Kraken again.

  “All that capability to deal out violence,” Cousteau said. “And yet when it came to this, they moved toward their dying and wounded. They could have killed us. They should all, in the very least, have fled and saved themselves.”

  “They didn’t, Jacques, because Yanni was right about them.”

  “I know. I expect they’ll awake me the rest of my nights with this revelation: Maybe they’re better than us.”

  Report on the Brunswick Incident

  Removed from Restricted Status, July 13, 1948

  Royal Norwegian Navy Archives, May 6, 1930

  Royal auxiliary tanker Brunswick was en route to Samoa among the Pacific Navigator Islands when overtaken by a large cephalopod, believed to be a squid. Animal paced Brunswick’s 495-foot hull in excess of ten knots, spouting jets of water. While jetting, cephalopod appeared to grow and shrink at will. Deliberately, and without provocation, it turned from what appeared to be a parallel course and attacked the Brunswick no fewer than three times, ramming the hull and wrapping its tentacles over portholes and gangway doors and up toward the vessel’s forward well deck. Owing to hostilities between Japan and Korea and current aggression projected against Pacific Islands and shipping, Brunswick was provisioned with precautionary armament. Unclear how many weapons were involved in defense of ship. Animal eventually released grip and passed aft near the propellers after dispersing “huge gluts” of ink or blood. Two other large cephalopods, reportedly sighted with it, “aiding.”

  Epilogue

  The Descent of Man

  If we kill off the wild, then we are killing off a part of our souls.

  —Jane Goodall