by Bill Schutt
During the war, Cousteau had been responsible for the deaths of many Germans, as had his friend Mac.
“How do you get used to it?” Mac once asked. “The killing?”
“I never did,” Cousteau replied. “And I hope I never do.”
After the war, he had taken a personal oath: “When helping an injured man in the field, I will not take nationality into consideration.”
The wound in Uri’s back was ragged and still potentially deadly. Two Russians on the night watch, including their team’s surgeon, had all of their internal “organ meats” scooped out during the raid. The Kraken had only begun their work on Uri. Barbs tore his skin and a kidney was removed through an unfinished slit before the first two seconds (and only seconds) of rounds from Russian “silencers” intervened.
Now Cousteau was rendered the most field-medicine-qualified person in the base camp. He knew that the peak pressure of a kidney stone was high on the pH scale for pain, and that the haphazard removal of a whole kidney must be far worse.
For now, however, the patient was a welcome distraction. There was much else to worry about. The softening up of the French and American prisoners for “debriefing” included the standard tools of sleep deprivation and denial of both food and water. Just enough broth and strong coffee had been provided by Acting Commander Leonov to aid Cousteau in cauterizing the shredded plumbing in Uri’s back, and the newly assigned prison surgeon suspected that he and his assistant, Boulle, might even be allowed a brief nap tonight, for the safety of the patient. But Cousteau knew the worst was yet to come and, in fact, was already upon their doorstep.
“Alan—” Cousteau whispered to Boulle. The name stuck in his throat. Minutes before the attack, Boulle and his friends had been uncuffed and taken outdoors by Uri—who was apparently playing “good cop” to all of the prisoners, against Leonov’s “bad cop.” Any interrogation Uri had in mind was ended by the cephalopods. According to Leonov, Alan Tse-lin was missing and presumed dead. He and Uri had been standing very near to where the mission surgeon and his aide fell. Dmitri Chernov was also missing and apparently dead.
“There is still hope for Alan,” Boulle whispered back. “We have to believe that.”
And there was nothing else to be said, Cousteau judged. The lieutenant had done his duty in tending to the wounded Russian. And for the moment, at least, he was more useful to Leonov as a hydrated and energetic French medic than as a starved and sleep-deprived prisoner.
He could assess their situation more clearly now that the mission commander, too, had much else to worry about. The commandos had set up an impressive communications station and were receiving coded signals from at least three vessels in the area. The two Frenchmen did not need a translator to tell them what was happening aboard a ship called Koresh.
They’d heard this awful thing before.
July 7, 1948
1:22 a.m.
En route to MacCready Base Camp #4
No astronomer discovering a new feature among the dark lines and blotches of Mars, or in the rings of Saturn, could have been happier than Alan Tse-lin when he encountered a new zoological wonder, even a dangerous one. He once explained to Yanni that he had been both lucky and unlucky in selecting the place of his birth, among the forested limestone pinnacles along the Li River. Prior to the war with Japan, the beauty of the place and the strangeness of its wildlife were incomparable—that is, until he saw a certain Himalayan maze of valleys, and Santorini.
Now he had come to perhaps the strangest lost world of all, filled with wonderful and terrifying creatures—complete with a female Dr. Doolittle of the Kraken.
“So, Yanni,” Alan said, “what did your little octopus in the tree have to say?”
“No words yet.”
“Then?”
“I think they started out more curious about us than aggressive. Those shifts of body colors, the clicking and buzzing are not just for show. Most animals will bark or roar, but that one in the tree—it really, really did feel like we were two jazz musicians playing off each other.”
“So, Alan, your first impression was right,” Mac said. “An interspecies jam session.”
“For you two, just another day at the office,” said Alan.
“The Kraken wasn’t just making noise. We were both listening and learning. I thought I could smell it, but I knew from the music that the moment I began sweating, it was learning even more from me than I could learn from it.”
“I think I can see how,” Mac said. “An octopus has at least a dog’s sense of smell, right?”
“Yeah. Its arms can taste and smell—and boy, how they can! I’m talking about, maybe in the neighborhood of one molecule in millions, of adrenaline. I’m thinking the weirdest part was in realizing that if I became the least bit frightened, it could reach out into the air and instantly taste my fear.”
“Then it learned plenty from me,” Alan concluded.
“It recognized you,” Yanni said. “It recognized all three of us. And the music was one of the most unbelievable experiences in my life.”
“Wish I could really understand that,” Mac said.
“Try, and maybe someday you will,” said Yanni. “But don’t mistake my idea of it being music to mean that it’s all pleasant. During that one moment, when I looked up and saw that the little Kraken was gone, and the music with it, I was hit by the strongest, most incredible sense of loneliness I have ever known.”
“You know what I think?” Alan asked.
“What?”
“I think you found a treasure. For all the horror of it, every once in a while the sea tosses you a gift. That jam session, and your loneliness, after—that was one of them.”
July 7, 1948
1:42 a.m.
Southwest of Santorini lagoon, a strange electronic shriek had gone out into the night, received clearly by Nesbitt’s captors at Base Camp #3: “They’re coming through pipes and bulkheads! They’re coming through the walls!”
These were the last words anyone heard from the Koresh.
Twenty minutes after the ship went radio silent, a string of vintage mines drifted up against the starboard side. The flash from the explosion-chain was visible along MacCready’s route to a new encampment, and all across Santorini.
July 7, 1948
Santorini
They reached a suitable base camp at 2:20 a.m. It was not really a camp proper, just another stand of wild fig trees. Miles away in the southwest, smoke from a stupendous explosion was still rising against the stars. Whatever happened, Mac knew it could only be getting the Russians even more lathered up. His aim was to avoid setting up the kind of camp that would leave clear signs of habitation. Even the smallest campfire was bound to give off a smell that would linger in the air and on the trees, and could be tracked by a skilled landing party.
In an emergency, if we know they’re approaching, I can have us on the move in seconds, Mac told himself. And that should, hopefully, be good enough.
“Making sure we have clean drinking water is going to be a problem,” Mac cautioned, as he tore little shreds from a strip of salted meat.
“I’m used to it,” said Alan, pocketing his ration of goat jerky for later. “We all know the odds. I’m just glad to be away from Nesbitt right now. Last time I saw her, she still looked ready to slit my throat if she caught me napping.”
“You might try not killing her people sometime,” Yanni said.
Alan did not bother to answer. He looked up, distracted by something in the sky.
Mac understood the new distraction immediately; it was at least twenty thousand feet overhead, and it emitted the low, distinctive growl of a jet engine. He knew that the speed of sound was sufficiently slow, and the distance sufficiently great, that the aircraft was actually somewhere in front of the sound’s apparent point of origin. Mac looked ahead of that point, hoping to glimpse the plane passing before the backdrop of stars.
He saw nothing. He could only determine that it was flyin
g from the direction of mainland Greece toward the island of Crete, and he could only wonder why the flight was being made at night. Mac and Hendry had discussed new infrared cameras that might eventually prove helpful in tracking miniature horses and other strange mammals of Brazil’s Hell’s Gate region, but the technology was military in origin and he was betting now that it was being field tested at twenty thousand feet. The zoologist reminded himself that the “test” could reveal nothing about the locations of the Kraken, because they were doubtless cold-blooded, like all other cephalopods, and could not be seen in the “warm” wavelengths. As for discerning Russians and Americans on the ground, that kind of test seemed meaningless; it was the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack.
As the engine noise faded in the south, it became tempting to try to forget that the plane—and all that it implied—had really been there.
Good luck with that, Mac told himself, and said, “I wish I could believe it was one of ours, but I doubt it.”
“So, where do we go?” asked Alan.
Mac looked up at a tall hill, silhouetted against the stars. “The usual advantage of high ground won’t do. Too many Russians ashore, and it’s the first place they’ll look for us.”
“So, where to?”
“For now, we stay here. There’s enough leaf cover overhead to hide us from Russian surveillance planes, if they come our way.” He shrugged, gazing in the direction of the island’s east coast. “If we have to move, I know of a few places down toward the shore that will provide good cover.”
“I’d hardly call that a safe bet,” said Alan, waving an arm around at the lagoon and the sea beyond. “You know, Kraken down there?”
“I’ve told you,” Yanni said, “I think they recognize us.”
“Sure. As part of a human menace that’s killed a bunch of them, maybe. They’ll recognize us for that. Yanni, they’re wild animals.”
“So are we.”
Alan shook his head. “Can’t believe this is happening. I came to this island nice and peaceful-like. The only thing I wanted to do was get away from it all, study some fossils with my friend Pierre, take in the view, maybe even share a bottle of grappa and have a few laughs—but, noooo . . . You two have come along. And in no time at all, there’s jets and Black Sun and Kraken and—what now? Friggin’ fleets of ships coming in with cannons?” He looked around. “You’re a lightning rod for trouble, Mac. You know that, don’t you?”
The zoologist, Mac—the guy from a field of science that seemed guaranteed to mean a quiet, peaceful existence—was familiar with the old joke about how it had turned out for him. They called it the MacCready effect: “If you’re around Mac, you’re going to see spectacular shit happen,” he recalled Hendry explaining. “But if you’re standing right next to him, you’ll usually get out all right.”
“I’ve heard, Alan, that the major calls me a probabilistic anomaly?”
“He sometimes has another way of putting it, Captain: that you are simultaneously the luckiest and unluckiest bastard he’s ever known.”
“Of course. Sorry I didn’t get to crash another helicopter—yet.”
“Face it, Mac: stuff just happens to you. To both of you, I guess.
“You don’t have such a good record yourself,” Yanni said. “You survived travel with a commander on a suicide mission, spear attacks, and—”
“And don’t forget the chompy snow.”
“Right. Deadly snow, red grottos, Yeren and Kraken.”
“Not many people know about any of those,” Mac said, “and I sure wish we could keep a lid on all of it.”
“We’ve faced harder challenges.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Mac was trying to push away a feeling that was finally catching up with him. He knew Hendry and Knight used to have arguments about the MacCready effect: “Do you really want to be in the same elevator with him and Yanni, or in a plane at thirty thousand feet?” They used to try to quantify it: “Mac and Yanni always survive, and they get the job done, but even in an elevator—you’d better be prepared for a hell of a ride.”
“Look,” Alan said. “It’s easy to think you’re hot shots because you lived, but there’s a thing called ‘the walking dead’ that the Navy’s Hellcat pilots know about. And that means you start to get careless because you think you’re some kind of immortal. Well, you’re not.”
“Yes. I think we know that.”
“No, you don’t. You think you can play with the Kraken like they’re little kitty cats? Better remember this: They’re like tigers with lots of legs, and a thousand teeth in each leg. And they’re smarter than tigers—which makes them even more unpredictable. And you are not immortal.”
70 a.d.
Campania, Italy
Pliny the Elder called the creature “a monstrous polypus.”
Long before Pliny was born, the cephalopods from the Devil’s Hole and the lost Mediterranean canyon had continued to evolve into varying though generally cooperative morphs. Those that survived became social animals. Like wolves and monkeys, they tended to travel in groups. A few retained their ability to emerge onto land—and especially during rainy nights or in the presence of sea spray.
In his eleventh volume of Natural History, Pliny described a many-tentacled night visitor (a “polypus,” named as a predecessor of the word “octopus”) that developed a sort of addiction to fish being pickled in huge vats.
According to Pliny, it came from beneath the sea, squeezed between the pickets of iron fences, and even when caught by the merchants’ guards, escaped into the trees. Pliny believed there was a whole family of the beasts, moving between the water and the trees—but only one of them ended up being caught, having been sniffed out and finally cornered by trained attack dogs.
Many large squid species possessed suckers lined with knifelike teeth, but this creature was armed with rotating hooks. The guards and owners of the fish pickling and sauce factory—“They really thought they were joining battle with some monster,” Pliny recorded. “It would drive off the dogs—strike at them with its stronger arms, giving blows with so many clubs, as it were; and it was only with the greatest difficulty that it could be dispatched with the aid of a considerable number of three-pronged fish spears.”
He described the corpse’s large suckers and their correspondingly imposing teeth, its arms “full of knots,” and its body heavier than a cask of fifteen amphorae.
“Who could have expected to find a polypus there?” Pliny asked. “Or could have recognized it as such, under these circumstances?”
Chapter 18
Chains of Command
The weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all birds and mammals and other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.
—Cambridge Declaration on Conscious Life on Earth, Francis Crick Memorial Conference, July 7, 2012
July 9, 1948
Officer’s Mess and Smoking Room
Undisclosed Location at Sea
Captain Charles L. Christian had pledged himself to serve to the best of his ability even at the cost of his own life. There was no small consolation in the knowledge that he had demonstrated his patriotism through three kamikaze attacks—one of them aboard this very ship, having left more than 20 percent of his body severely burned.
I am loyal, he emphasized for himself—even if, under General Douglas MacArthur’s command, it was becoming difficult to be sure under whose navy he was sailing.
And strangest of all, thought Captain Christian, that while steaming full ahead into this disaster, I share my ancestry with history’s most controversial mutineer. He just hoped it did not end for him the same way it ended for Fletcher Christian of the Bounty: murdered by one of his own men.
But I’m not a mutineer. I’m a patriot who still stands tall for my country after being burned, shot, blown up, and burned again—and having lived to
confront the frozen hell of Operation High-jump. But, oh—how I wish my parents had stayed at home in the South Pacific, where I could have been born out of history’s way—and most of all, stayed away from this present dilemma.
“Home” had been a subtropical paradise, so remote that the Japanese completely overlooked it during their conquest of the Pacific islands. But in 1912 his parents had embarked from Norfolk Island to Ellis Island. Even before he was born, they had set in motion for him a collision with history.
The captain suspected that the White House knew little or nothing of MacArthur’s plans. If this suspicion proved true, then it was not the first time, nor would it likely be the last time, that the general acted on his own, as if President Truman did not exist. Any omnipresent being, looking down upon this mission, could surely have foreseen the swerve of history that MacArthur would eventually bring to North Korea and China, and even to the Mediterranean—sending forth a cascade of consequences from this century into the next.
Presently, two distinctly unsettling names were foremost on his mind. The death cry from a Russian ship had been preceded by a routine coded message. It named Nora Nesbitt (“the peach”) and designated her as captive, along with her Catalina crew. This also meant that the bioweaponeer Kitano Hata must also be in Russian hands—each of these scientists of equal strategic importance to whatever country possessed them.
How I wish my parents had stayed in Norfolk . . . But there was little time to regret what might have been. He had to answer the general.
Christian believed it likely that the Russians had already broken the code he would be using for the message. He was also sure, to 100 percent certainty, that this was just as MacArthur wanted it to be. During the past twenty-four hours, no fewer than three ships had been spotted by air recon, moving toward Santorini. Stalin was projecting serious firepower into the region.