by Bill Schutt
The giant rose from the bottom and hung poised for several moments, displaying for the crew its many suckers—and then, slowly at first, it backed away from the venting poisons. After a pause, it shot off and vanished behind swirls of ink and seabed muck.
Below, the smaller creature reappeared, then it too retreated in a blur of motion and billows of muck.
The captain was already on the comms to the engine room. “Mount Elija, are you okay back there?”
“Fucking far from okay,” replied a calm voice. “John, we’ve had a problem here.”
“How bad?”
“Under control now. Eighty-percent power. We had to pump out and cool down, but we’ve got to keep this end of the boat completely sealed. Permanently, I’m afraid. Filters are pulling most of the particulates from the air and flushing them outside but no matter how we cut it, our bodies are going to be taking ten rads per hour.”
Walter ran the numbers quickly through his head. They all did. If they surfaced and quickly abandoned ship, everyone, including the engine crew, was guaranteed to survive. If they continued the mission, then more than ten hours remained before the sun was down and the night became dark enough for their mission plan. This meant a dose, to the four men in the aft compartment, of more than one hundred rads. The average man could survive such exposure. But thirty hours and three hundred rads later, half of them could expect to be dead within two weeks and they would already be getting sick. Twenty hours after that, crossing over six hundred rads, almost no one survives.
“It’s a given that we can’t abandon the sub and leave it for the Russians to find,” Elija continued. “We’ll be well enough back here for a day or so. Your compartment’s still clean. So you go ahead, and do the rescue. We’ll stay on post and when you come back, we can safely evacuate you and the rescued to one of our ships. After you’re all out, we’ll come forward and take the controls.”
“What then?” the captain asked.
“Depends on time. If we’re getting really sick by then, we’ll take her to the deepest part of Santorini’s lagoon. If, as my math predicts, we’re sick but still holding up well enough, we’ll have almost a day to maneuver around Crete and make the Devil’s Hole. It’s deep there—well below our crush depth. It’ll be quick.”
Walter watched as Captain “John”—who now for the first time became known by a name—held the mike uncomfortably, reflected on what he’d just heard, and replied, “Understood.”
“So, your MacCready rescue plan is still on,” said Elija. “We’ll stay back here and work it for as long as we can. But you need to move quickly. Looks like the atom won this round.”
“Is . . . Is there anything I can do?”
“The mission is what you can do. Hope it really counts for something in the end.”
“Why shouldn’t it, Elija?”
“Read your history and biology. The plagues and the years without summer that finally killed Rome. The Black Death. Krakatoa, the Dust Bowl. And now the micro-universe of the atom. Nature always wins in the end.”
“Elija?”
“Enough of this. We’ve got a job to do. Get on with it. Even if only for a little while, make it count. Elija out.”
After a long silence, the captain landed on the seabed. He double-checked the course he had charted, and circled one of the penciled-in spots on a map in red. “That’s our landing spot,” he called back to his crew. “I’ll put us just offshore of where those towers of white rock break the surface. The waves hitting them make plenty of noise to cover our tracks.”
“Should I prepare a music box?” Walter suggested.
“Yes. Just in case our carrier’s crew have any ideas that could make things worse—best to let them know we’re here, and still alive.”
The music box worked exactly as the name suggested. Pins on a roller, with only ten minutes of programming effort required, would send out any desired Morse signal, at regular intervals—in this case, simply “Raccoon.” After torpedoing to the surface and motoring away from the NR-3 dispatch point, the little transmitter would send its message—meaningless to the Russians, but telling the American fleet that an extraction crew was still mission-active.
Six hours and sixty rads after the message went out, NR-3 approached the shallows, with only two hundred yards to go before egress. Fortunately, the large cephalopods seemed to be avoiding them—or, rather, their venting poisons. Perhaps not as fortunately, Walter, Captain John, and the commandos would be paddling ashore in very low light, with the moon in only its third night as a waxing crescent.
Walter thought about the men in the engine room—that such people always seemed to step forward in the worst of times. Because of their choice, they had at most two days left between the margin of the living and the dead. But he expected that he would probably die ahead of them.
The rest of the landing crew clearly had similar expectations, but as Elija had said, “We’ve got a job to do.”
Normally they would have infiltrated a city or a town dressed as dockworkers or cab drivers. But Santorini had too small a population in which to blend. Though the island had “only hotels in town” aplenty, there were no taxicabs. Tonight they would dress strictly practical.
No matter how hard he tried to project a confident sense of calm, Walter always felt awkward donning bullet-resistant flack gear and weapons. Captain John seemed to sense the emotions Walter was trying to hide and forced a reassuring smile in his direction. But there was no room for smiling or reassurance this evening.
Elija is right, Walter concluded. Nature always wins in the end.
July 10, 1948
10:00 p.m.
Inside Captured MacCready Base Camp #3
Santorini
There was no doubt in Mac’s mind that the Russian reinforcements who had come ashore were, like Dmitri, members of an elite fighting group trained in every shade of the combat spectrum, from arctic to urban warfare. He noticed that the faces of no fewer than three of these men bore distinctive patterns of shrapnel scars, known since the war as “German kisses.” If there was any doubt in Mac’s mind that Dmitri’s comrades were fearless of their own mortality, the wounds of Cherkassy, Kursk, and Stalingrad removed it.
There were enough of these men, Mac supposed, to form a double-layered perimeter outside the compound.
Dmitri seemed very, very confident in the outcome. He approached Mac and Yanni with a concave aluminum dish attached to a battery and a miniature siren. “No harm in telling you that this is a motion detector,” he said. “We now have the whole perimeter covered. Anything American or cephalopod comes near, and we’ll know.”
“Nice piece of technology,” Mac acknowledged.
“Yes. Not bad, eh? Not bad for a people you Yanks probably regard as uninventive barbarians.”
“Quite a kill zone you’re building,” said Yanni.
“It’s good to kill sometimes, no? I see it in your eyes—both of you.” Dmitri looked Yanni up and down. “Sometimes the killing is very special and then it’s better than a beautiful woman wanting you.”
One of the other prisoners laughed. Another winced. Nesbitt called from across the room: “Pretty strange talk from a man who likes to quote the Bible. Ever heard that part about ‘Thou shalt not kill’?”
“No. Because in the original Hebrew, it says, ‘Thou shalt not commit murder.’ Did you ever read the rules given to Joshua before he killed all of Jericho? Even he was allowed to cleanse himself of killing in warfare. And when it comes to the Kraken? That’s not murder. That’s not even an unclean kill.” Dmitri returned his attention to Mac. “And certainly your aircraft carrier is not out there for mere decoration. What would be the plan of the men who hold your leash? Fire a torpedo with an atom bomb in it, at our ships? Turn this place into another Bikini Atoll?”
“You think that’s a plan?”
“Not a good one, for anything more than a threat—a bluff. What would you succeed at if you used it? Kill ten thousand Greeks on t
his island to get rid of a few ships? That would equal six times as many as you Americans lost at Pearl Harbor. And look how that ended, for Japan. The world will never stand by silently if you use A-bombs in anger a second time.”
“You seem to have figured it all out, except for the fact that the sea around us has thrown a monkey wrench into—”
A siren stopped Mac. Loud and clear in the night, one alarm—and then two, and then four more of the motion detectors shrieked and wailed. Moment Zero came upon them. The Russians and their captives knew the meaning of the wails without being told: someone or something was rushing the perimeter from multiple directions.
From the rooftop of Mac’s imprisoned encampment there came a sudden loud hiss, deep and hollow, as if something were boring through the air at high speed. Almost simultaneously there came a quick, guttural thud from the direction of the overlook on which they had watched the Intrepid’s arrival. A second hiss and thud followed—then a third, then two more, and as the night began to brighten with fire, Dmitri uncuffed Mac and Yanni.
He looked each in the eye and said, “Stay close to me. Say nothing. Understand?”
“Yes.”
July 10, 1948
10:00 p.m., Five Minutes Before Moment Zero
Ashore on Santorini, Fifty Yards From the South Perimeter
MacCready Base Camp #3
“Your name, son?” Captain John had asked. At this kind of time, Walter did see a measure of good sense in being known by something other than “flight engineer” or “T070.” It seemed clear enough that any of them could look either to the man next to him, or to himself, and be reasonably certain that in ten or fifteen minutes, one of them would no longer be alive.
“Call me Wally,” he said.
“Real name?”
“Close enough.”
“Call me Matthew,” whispered the commando at his side.
“Mark,” said another.
“Call me Luke.”
“Peter.”
“And before you ask,” said Captain John, “I’m not John the Baptist.”
The last two commandos did not give pseudonyms. One was silenced by a speed-slung disk of copper. As perimeter sirens blazed to life and explosive charges began rocketing out from the compound’s roof, a second man was slashed and carried away.
The monsters would easily have taken the entire team—probably in less than a minute, Walter supposed—if not for the firing from the compound. The essentially random explosions were followed by distracting flashes from the creatures themselves, rendered all the more confusing by how quickly the cephalopods adapted to mimicking—on their skin, and sometimes in synchronized groups—the detonation flashes of Russian shells landing on the ground.
A mimic flashed out pallid yellow and faded to red sparks, no more than ten yards to Walter’s right. He sensed something much darker and nearer and fired two shots into it. Then he hit the other, just as it went completely dark. To judge from what he knew of cephalopods, he supposed one or two bullets could not kill either of his attackers—but at least it will give them something to think about.
“If we ever get out of this alive,” Walter said to no one in particular, “I’m quitting the deep submergence program.”
“Me too,” said a voice in the night. It was the captain.
The first wave of cephalopod infiltrators came onto the rooftop battlements within the shadows of detonation flashes and mimicked flashes.
Behind the makeshift battlements, two Russian commandos were carefully selecting targets among the wailing motion sensors and firing upon them. One of the commandos glanced around and halted suddenly. He listened, and died.
“What did you—?” his comrade began to say, when a Kraken embraced him from behind and, with multiple whipping snaps of its arms, began to dissect him. With a defiant whipping and snapping motion of his own, as something ropy and sharp wiggled down between the muscles and bones of one arm, he tried to end it for both of them but misfired. His wrist sent an explosive charge rocketing into the floor of the battlement.
Alan’s first real indication of the human-Kraken struggle taking place overhead was a sudden push from behind, as if a giant’s hand had slapped him across the back. Along with McQueen and two others from Nesbitt’s Catalina crew, he was slapped from one side of the room to another, with such power that the chairs to which they had been restrained came apart, along with the restraints. It was a strange rule of nature, but a rule nonetheless, that human bodies tended to fare better during explosive events than man-made buildings and their furnishings.
When Alan sat up, he saw that, inexplicably, he and McQueen were free and uninjured. The room, what was left of it, was being illuminated by the fierce orange glow of a fire that burned not more than twenty or thirty feet away. Half of the ceiling was gone. The wall toward which he and the three Catalina crewmen were flung had crumpled and come apart like rice paper. Alan noticed that McQueen and a man whose name was unknown to him landed with their bodies halfway into the next room.
The fourth man was not so lucky. A section of wall had toppled onto his back, carrying with it a slab of rebar and cement roofing that pinned his chest to the ground. There would have been no point in trying to free him, even though new explosions and a fire nearby were clear and present dangers. The widest space between the roof slab and the ceramic floor tiles was too small for Alan to force his fingers through for leverage, much less accommodate the width of a still-beating heart.
Directly ahead, on the other side of the crumpled wall, Cousteau and Boulle struggled in their restraints. Alan helped McQueen to his feet and entered the room cautiously. There were no guards. Their captors had more pressing concerns. A new explosion rattled the building and brought more pieces falling from the ceiling. Two bursts of machine gun fire followed—incoming from somewhere beyond the sentry perimeters. A handful of bullets and at least two tracer shots came in through the room’s now-missing window, raking the ceiling.
“What the hell? Who are they fighting?” McQueen asked.
“Rescue?” Cousteau guessed.
Alan wondered why a landing party, during a mission that required stealth, would have brought a bulky machine gun, equipped with location-revealing tracers. And why would they be firing toward us?
He recalled a famous saying from World War II: When the Chinese began shooting, the Japanese ducked. When the Japanese started shooting, the Chinese and the Americans ducked. When the Americans started shooting, everyone ducked.
“I don’t know, guys,” Alan said at last. “I think it’s a trick.”
“What kind of trick?”
“We are being ambushed. Maybe we have finally managed to get the Greeks angry.”
Pierre Boulle shook his head sadly and began creeping toward the space where the window had been.
“I wouldn’t do that,” commanded a Russian-accented voice. Dmitri arrived with Mac, Yanni, and Nesbitt in tow. Alan was relieved to see that two more of his friends were alive and uninjured.
Dmitri went to the window space. “Dawn’s too many hours away,” he observed. “Long night ahead. Kraken out there.”
Another burst of machine gun fire, lasting no more than a split second, thudded through human flesh at the inner perimeter.
“Sounds like a Browning,” the Russian said. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“I should hope not,” Yanni replied.
Dmitri raised his head to the window again and gazed out toward the horizon. “‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil’—”
“Hey!” Yanni interrupted. “Hold that thought, will ya?”
July 10, 1948, Five Minutes after Moment Zero
Aircraft Carrier Intrepid
Five Miles Offshore of Santorini
Captain Christian and Lieutenant Tucker watched through binoculars, trying to make sense of what was happening near Akrotiri.
The flashes ceased, then started again, then ceased for mo
re than a minute.
“MacCready and Nesbitt are sure to be somewhere in the middle of that,” the captain said, “if they’re still alive.”
“Any signal from Nesbitt?”
The captain shook his head. “Nothing at all. Either it’s not necessary yet or the extraction has worked. Or she’s dead.”
Four tracer rounds went out over the rooftops of Akrotiri.
“Are we going to send in planes?” Tucker asked.
“Bomb them in the night and let God sort them out, is not what we’re here for. Hopefully, after the shooting is over, we’ll get another signal from the Raccoon-jump crew—whoever they are.”
“And whatever they rode in on.”
“Yes—yes,” Christian said. He stepped back from the rail. “Whoever they are, it’s Truman who assigned them, probably before MacArthur assigned us. And there’s one more thing in that regard.”
“Which is?”
“MacArthur hasn’t relinquished his priority here. But in their communications, the Russians are going a bit crazy about us. So, Washington’s bound to know any minute.” Captain Christian exhaled a sigh of relief. “Very soon, I expect we’ll be under Truman’s protocol.”
“Support Raccoon-jump?”
More tracer fire went up near Akrotiri, silent across the intervening miles. Captain Christian had posted extra sentries, equipping some with flamethrowers. On a flight deck, this was always last-resort equipment. He hoped the creatures Tucker had burned off the deck were not part of the fight on Santorini. The Russians were challenging enough.
“Support the Raccoon team—yes,” Christian said. “If there’s anything left of it at dawn.” He raised his binoculars and studied the fires emerging around the battle. “Meanwhile,” he continued, “anything new from our two Russian pilots?”
“Same old same old. Nothing but name and rank—with many reminders about the Geneva Convention and the treatment of officers. They seem to be under the impression that there’s some sort of prisoner exchange coming—like, as if they knew something before they ever took off.”