by James Morrow
Anthony raised his binoculars. Torpedo wake. Quite so. While Commander Waldron was being hunted down, one of his buddies had obviously gotten off a shot.
“Right full rudder!”
“Right full rudder!” repeated An-mei Jong, jerking the wheel forty degrees.
And then it happened. Before the tanker could answer to the helm, a horrid, toothy grinding reached the bridge, the slow-motion crunch of metal devouring metal, followed by a deep, ominous thud. Wall to wall, the wheelhouse shook.
“Delayed fuse,” Rafferty explained. “Fish broke through our plates before goin’ off.”
“That good or bad?” asked Ockham.
“Bad. Damn things do twice the damage that way, like dumdum bullets.”
Seizing the PA mike, Anthony threw the switch. “Now hear this! We’ve just absorbed an Mk-XIII torpedo along our starboard quarter! Repeat: torpedo hit along starboard quarter! Remember, sailors, below decks the Val is divided into twenty-four watertight tanks—we’re in no danger of foundering! Stand by to take on survivors from Mr. Mungo’s party!”
“The Maracaibo still won’t talk!” called Bliss from the radio shack.
“Keep trying!”
“Now what?” asked Rafferty.
“Now I go see if what I just told the crew is true.”
No sooner had Anthony entered the elevator car and begun his descent when a second Mk-XIII drilled into the Valparaíso and exploded. The shock wave lifted the car back toward level seven. He dropped to his knees. The car plunged, the steel cables stopping its fall like elastic cords saving a Bungee jumper.
As Anthony ran outside, a third fish found its target, sending a metallic shudder along the Val’s entire hull. He dashed down the catwalk. The two guilty Devastators roared straight across the weather deck, fleeing the scene of their crime. An acrid fragrance filled the air, a blend of hot metal and burning rubber suffused with a hint of frying meat. The captain climbed down the amidships stairway, sprinted to the starboard bulwark, and leaned over the rail.
Déjà vu. “No!” It was all happening again, the whole impossible spill. “No! No!” The Valparaíso was leaking, she was bleeding, she was hemorrhaging her ballast into the Norwegian Sea. Blood, thick blood, gallon upon gallon of sizzling, smoking, pungent blood spreading outward from the wounded hull like the first plague of Egypt, staining the waters red. “No! No!”
Anthony looked west. A quarter mile away, Mungo and his lifeboat team rowed toward the torpedo crews: four benumbed war reenactors, treading water amid the billowing canopies and tangled lines of their parachutes.
Plucking the walkie-talkie from his waist, Anthony shouted, “Van Horne to Rafferty! Come in, Marbles!”
He looked down. Evidently a torpedo had blundered into Follingsbee’s garden, for the Greenland Current now bloomed with huge broccoli stalks, sixty-pound oranges, and carrots the size of surfboards, the whole nutritious mess drifting on the crimson tide like croutons in gazpacho.
“Jesus—two more hits, right?” groaned Rafferty from the walkie-talkie. “What’s it like down there?”
“Bloody.”
“We sinking?”
“We’re fine,” Anthony insisted. His honest assessment, but also something of a prayer. “Call up O’Connor and make sure the boilers are okay. And let’s get everybody into life jackets.”
“Aye-aye!”
The captain pivoted north. A sickly blue aurora glimmered in the sky. Beneath the waves, a fourth torpedo made its run, heading straight for the prow.
“Stop!” he yelled at the obscene fish. “Stop, you!”
The torpedo hit home, and as the cargo bay burst open, releasing its holy stores, a disquieting question entered Anthony’s brain.
“Stop! No! Stop!”
If the Val went down, was he supposed to go down with her?
“Get those bastards!” screamed Christopher Van Horne into the intercom mike. “Blow ’em out of the sky!” he ordered his first mate, a wiry Corsican named Orso Peche, presently stationed in the launch-control bunker amidships. The Maracaibo’s master spun toward Neil Weisinger. “Come right to zero-six-zero! They’re trying to kill my son!”
Never before had Neil witnessed such sheer volcanic anger in a sea captain—in any man. “Right to zero-six-zero,” he echoed, working the wheel.
The captain’s misery was understandable. Of the entire squadron called Torpedo Six, only three armed planes still remained in the fight, but if even one of them kicked its load into the bleeding Val, she would surely die.
“All ahead full!”
“All ahead full,” echoed Mick Katsakos at the control console. “What’s that red stuff?”
“Ballast,” Neil explained.
“Wish I had my camera.”
An elegant little Aspide blasted from its launcher, tracking down and vaporizing its target just as the crew bailed out.
“One down, two to go,” said Peche over the intercom.
“That is quite a body,” said Katsakos. “Mmm-mmm.”
“Never been another like it,” said Neil.
Now, suddenly, a fourth man was on the bridge. Dressed in a waterproof alb, trembling with a fury that paled only in comparison with the captain’s, Tullio Cardinal Di Luca waddled toward the console.
“Captain, you must stop shooting at those planes! You must stop it right now!”
“They’re trying to kill my son!”
“I knew we hired the wrong man!”
For the tenth time since the Maracaibo’s arrival at the 71st parallel, the rugged old Spaniard named Gonzalo Cornejo popped out of the radio shack to announce that the Valparaíso’s communications officer was trying to get in touch.
“She’s really—how do you say?—she’s really driving me bugfuck.”
“Like to talk back to her, would you?” asked the captain.
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell the Valparaíso that Christopher Van Horne doesn’t negotiate with pimps for the skin-flick industry. Got that, Gonzo? I don’t talk to pimps.” As Cornejo made a crisp about-face, the captain gave him a second order—“Pipe in the traffic, okay?”—then turned to Neil and said, “Ten degrees left rudder.”
“Ten left,” said Neil, wondering what sort of man would commit cold-blooded murder on his son’s behalf but refuse to exchange two words with him over the radio.
“Captain, if you cannot resist the temptation to fire your missiles, then we simply must leave,” said Di Luca, face reddening. “Do you understand? I’m ordering you to turn this ship around.”
“You mean retreat? Screw that, Eminence.”
“The cardinale has a point,” said Katsakos. “Maybe you noticed—these idiots still have six armed dive bombers over by the belly.”
Even as the mate spoke, a Devastator pilot’s agitated tones blasted from the bridge speaker. “Lieutenant Sharp to Commander McClusky. Come in, Commander.”
“McClusky here,” replied the leader of Air Group Six from his position above the omphalos.
“Sir, you got any eggs left?”
“One echelon’s worth. We’re about to unload ’em. Over.”
“There’s a Persian Gulf tanker on the field,” said Sharp. “Any chance you could help us out?”
“Gulf tanker? Whoa! Spruance said there wouldn’t be any screening vessels. Over.”
“Guess he fibbed.”
“We never done a Gulf tanker script, Sharp—nothin’ that modern. Over.”
“It’s kickin’ the shit out of us! We’re down to just me and Beeson!”
“Christ. Okay, I’ll see what we can do…”
Katsakos’s golden Mediterranean skin acquired a decidedly greenish cast. “Sir, may I remind you we’ve got a full hold? If just one of McClusky’s bombs connects, we’ll go up like Hiroshima.”
A prickly sensation overtook Neil, a tingling such as he’d not experienced since getting gassed inside the Val. The dive bombers were coming, bearing their deadly matches. “I should’ve stayed i
n Jersey City,” he told Di Luca. “I should’ve waited for another ship.”
“We can always come back later and make sure the Enterprise pulled your son and his crew from their lifeboats,” said Katsakos. “As for now…”
“Anthony Van Horne won’t be crawling into any goddamn lifeboat,” said the captain. “He’ll be going down with his ship.”
“Nobody does that anymore.”
“The Van Hornes do.”
Sighting through the bridge binoculars, Neil saw McClusky’s Dauntless echelon abandon the belly and begin a steady climb, evidently intending to circle around and attack the Maracaibo from the rear.
“Mr. Peche,” said the captain into the intercom mike, “kindly target the approaching dive bombers with Crotales.” He grabbed a swatch of the second mate’s pea jacket, twisting it like a tourniquet. “Who on board can operate a Phalanx cannon?”
“Nobody,” said Katsakos.
“Not you?”
“No, sir.”
“Not Peche?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll fire it.”
“I insist we turn around!” seethed Di Luca.
“Mr. Katsakos, I’m putting you in charge,” said the captain, starting away. “Alter course as the situation requires, whatever gives me a clear shot at the tow chains—they’re only targeting the Val so the body’ll go down with her!”
Neil looked south. Two Crotales were flying across God’s nose toward the maneuvering dive bombers. The warheads exploded simultaneously, hitting the echelon leader and the next plane in line an instant after their pilots and gunners bailed out. Trailing black oil, the first Dauntless crashed into the chin, shattering the encrusted ice and igniting the beard. Wingless, the second plane became a flaming sphere, roaring through the sky and falling into God’s left eye like a cinder.
Neil focused on the beard, each whisker enveloped by a high, slender flame coiling around its shaft. He lowered his gaze. Christopher Van Horne stood on the fo’c’sle deck, his mountainous form hunched over the starboard Phalanx, his purple parka rippling in the Arctic wind.
“Steady,” said Katsakos from the control console.
“Steady,” echoed Neil.
As the blood spill splashed against the Maracaibo’s prow, her captain swerved the gun and aimed. A sudden puff of smoke appeared, haloing the muzzle. Fifty yards from the Valparaíso, a fountain of seawater shot into the air, dead center between the chains.
“Left ten,” muttered Katsakos.
“Left ten.”
Van Horne fired again. This time the shell hit home, turning the central link into a silvery flash of pulverized metal. As the chain flew apart, the segment nearer the cranium slithered into the ocean while its stubby counterpart swung toward the stern, clanging against the hull.
“Nice shooting, Captain!” cried the excited mate. “Steady!”
“Steady,” said Neil.
“Dive bombers at twelve o’clock!” screamed Katsakos.
Another shell flew from the starboard Phalanx, disintegrating a link and neatly separating the Val from her cargo. Whether or not Christopher Van Horne saw the fruits of his marksmanship was unclear, for the instant the chain broke, a Dauntless dropped its payload barely fifty feet from the captain. The bomb detonated. Cannon, hatches, icicles, and chunks of bulwark sailed heavenward, borne on a pillar of fire. Within seconds the entire fo’c’sle was burning, gouts of black smoke swirling above the fractured deck like rain clouds poised to release India ink.
“No!” shrieked Katsakos.
“Holy shit!” groaned Neil.
“I told him to turn around!” sputtered Di Luca.
Flawlessly, the Maracaibo’s firefighting system sprang to life. As the klaxon brayed across the Norwegian Sea, a dozen robot hoses appeared, rising from the bulwarks like moray eels slithering out of their lairs. Jets of frothy white foam shot from the nozzles.
“Oh, Christ!” screamed Katsakos as the flames gasped and died. “Oh, Lord!” he wailed. The foam subsided like an outgoing tide, leaving behind a mass of melted pipework and the fallen body of Christopher Van Horne. “Oh, God, they blew up the captain!”
When the Maracaibo went to war against Air Group Six, incinerating her torpedo planes and dive bombers with deadly guided missiles, the focus of Oliver’s terror shifted from Cassie to himself. He was not embarrassed. It was Cassandra, in fact, who liked to dismiss so-called heroism as but one step removed from theistic self-delusion, and besides, at the moment his own peril clearly outclassed hers, the Maracaibo being likely to interpret Strawberry Eleven as yet another hostile plane and attack accordingly.
True, the Gulf tanker had just sustained a direct hit from a 500-pound demolition bomb. But instead of touching off either the tanker’s cargo oil or her bunker fuel, the explosion had merely ignited her fo’c’sle deck—a localized conflagration soon brought under control by automated foam throwers—and before long she was enthusiastically targeting the two armed Devastators and three armed Dauntlesses remaining in the air.
“I can’t stand this!” shouted Oliver.
“Scared, are you?” asked Flume, who did not himself seem particularly happy.
“You bet I’m scared!”
“Don’t be ashamed if your bowels let go,” said Pembroke, likewise distraught. “During World War Two, almost a quarter of all infantrymen lost that kind of control in battle.”
“At least, that’s how many admitted to it,” added Flume, nervously winding his headset cord around his wrist. “The actual percentage was probably higher.”
Tow chains severed, the Valparaíso listed badly to starboard. Blood pooled along her hull. Even if she began to founder, Oliver reasoned, there’d be plenty of time for Cassie and her shipmates to get away in lifeboats—whereas if the Maracaibo opened fire on Strawberry Eleven, her crew and passengers would all, most probably, die.
“Van Horne must’ve been trimmin’ her with blood,” said Reid over the intercom. “Good way to lighten his load—right, Mr. Flume?”
Flume made no reply. His partner remained equally silent. As the Maracaibo took on the remnants of Air Group Six, the war reenactors sat rigidly in their machine-gun blisters and listened to the transceiver broadcasts, a radio horror show to put their beloved Inner Sanctum to shame.
“Missile at six o’clock!”
“Mayday! Mayday!”
“Bail out, everybody!”
“Help me!”
“Jump!”
“Shit!”
“Mommy! Mommy!”
“This isn’t in my contract!”
Oliver felt like praying, but it was impossible to gather the requisite energy when the decayed, frozen, violated remains of the God he didn’t believe in stretched so starkly before his eyes.
“Alby?”
“Yeah, Sid?”
“Alby, I’m not having any fun.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Alby, I want to go home.”
“Ensign Reid,” said Flume into his intercom mike, “kindly climb to nine thousand feet and set off for Point Luck.”
“You mean—withdraw?”
“Withdraw.”
“Ever walk out on one of your own shows before?” asked Reid.
“Just leave, Jack.”
“Roger,” said the pilot, pulling back on the control yoke.
“Alby?”
“Yeah, Sid?”
“Two of our actors are dead.”
“Most of ’em bailed out.”
“Two are dead.”
“I know.”
“Waldron’s dead,” said Pembroke. “His gunner too, Ensign Collins.”
“Carny Otis, right?” said Flume. “I saw him at the Helen Hayes once. Iago.”
“Alby, I think we done bad.”
“Attention, Torpedo Six!” came Ray Spruance’s portrayer’s voice from the transceiver. “Attention, Scout Bombing Six! Listen, men, no matter how you slice it, we aren’t being paid to mess with a Gulf tank
er! Break off the attack and return to Enterprise! Repeat: break off attack and return! We weigh anchor at 1530 hours!”
From out of nowhere a crippled dive bomber arrived, sheets of flame flowing from her wings. The plane zoomed so close that Oliver could see the pilot’s face—or, rather, he would have seen the pilot’s face had it not been burned clear to the bone.
“It’s Ensign Gay!” cried Pembroke. “They got Ensign Gay!”
“Please, God, no!” shouted Flume.
The runaway Dauntless headed straight for the flying boat’s tail, shedding sparks and firebrands. Pembroke shrieked madly, moving his hands back and forth as if pantomiming a frenetic game of cat’s cradle. Then, as Strawberry Eleven reached nine thousand feet, the bomber collided with her, snapping off the PBY’s rudder, severing her starboard stabilizer, puncturing her fuselage, and pouring burning gasoline into the tunnel gunner’s compartment, each individual disaster unfolding so rapidly that Oliver’s single scream sufficed to cover them all. A mass of flames swept along the aft flooring and into the portside blister. Searing heat filled the cabin. Within seconds, Albert Flume’s cotton trousers, aviator’s scarf, and flak jacket were ablaze.
“Aaaiiii!”
“Alby!”
“Put me out!”
“Put him out!”
“God, put me out!”
“Here!” Charles Eaton’s portrayer shoved a glossy red cylinder into Oliver’s lap.
“What’s this?” Oliver couldn’t tell whether the tears flooding his eyes sprang from terror, pity, or the black smoke wafting through the mechanic’s station. “What? What?”
“Read the directions!”
“Oh, Jesus!” screamed Flume. “Oh, sweet Jesus!”
“I think we lost our tail!” cried Reid over the intercom.
Oliver wiped his eyes. HOLD UPRIGHT. He did. PULL PIN. Pin? What pin? He made a series of desperate grabs—please, God, please, the pin—and suddenly he was indeed gripping something that looked like a pin.
“Put me out!”
“Put him out! Oh, Alby, buddy!”
STAND BACK 10 FEET AND AIM AT BASE OF FIRE. Oliver Seized the discharge hose and pointed it toward Flume.
“We lost our tail!”
“Put me out!”