Towing Jehovah

“Hey, take it easy.” Flume uncapped a Rheingold with a cast-iron Fred Astaire opener. “Nobody’ll get hurt. We’re giving the Japs plenty of time to save themselves. Want a beer? A Spam-and-onion sandwich?”

“You heard the captain! He’s not go

“Once he absorbs a hit or two, I’m sure he’ll reconsider,” said Pembroke. “It takes hours for a big boat like Valparaíso to go down — hours.”

“You people are insane! You’re out of your fucking minds!”

“Hey, don’t get pissed at us,” said Flume.

“We’re only doing what you hired us to do,” said Pembroke.

“Contact Admiral Spruance! Tell him to call off the attack!”

“We never call off an attack,” said Flume, swishing his index finger back and forth. “Have a nice cold Rheingold, okay? You’ll feel much better.” The impresario snatched up his intercom mike.

“Ensign Reid, I think it would be a bad idea if Mr. Shostak back here got his hands on our transceiver.”

“Listen, fellas, I’ve been lying to you,” groaned Oliver. “That body down there isn’t a Jap golem.”

“Oh?” said Pembroke.

“It’s God Almighty.”

“Right,” said Flume with a snide smile.

“God Himself. I swear it. You wouldn’t want to hurt God, would you?”

Flume sipped his beer. “Phew, Oliver, that’s a pretty lame one.”

At exactly 1150, just as McClusky had promised, a V of torpedo planes circled around and, ignoring Oliver’s frantic protests, ran for the tanker, dropping their Mk-XIIIs and sailing over the deckhouse, concomitantly slashing the Vatican flag to ribbons. Like sharks on the scent of blood, the five torpedoes cut across the Val’s wake, passed under her starboard tow chain, grazed her stern, and kept on going. A minute later, they struck a berg and detonated, filling the air with glittering barrages of ice balls.

“Hah! Missed!” came Van Horne’s voice from the transceiver. “You clowns couldn’t hit a dead cat with a fly swatter!”

“Golly, I thought our boys were better trained than that,” said Pembroke.

“They’re not used to these low temperatures,” said Flume.

Breathing a sigh of relief, Oliver looked out to sea — past the Valparaíso, past her cargo. A massive ship, encrusted with rockets and guns, was steaming onto the battlefield from the south.

“Hey, Oliver, what the heck is that thing?” demanded Flume.

“Don’t ask me,” the Enlightenment League’s president replied, putting on his headset.

“You said there’d be no screening vessels!” whined Pembroke. “You explicitly said that!”

“I haven’t the foggiest idea what that ship’s doing here.”

“Looks like one of them Persian Gulf tankers, Mr. Flume,” said Reid over the intercom.

“That’s what she is, all right,” said Eaton. “A goddamn Persian Gulf tanker.”

“Isn’t that just like the nineties” — Reid banked Strawberry Eleven, flying her west across the tow chains — “showing up when you least expect ’em?”

“Missed!” cried Anthony, storming up and down the wheel-house, glove wrapped firmly around the transceiver mike, its cable trailing behind him like an umbilicus. “Missed, suckers! You couldn’t hit an elephant’s ass with a canoe paddle! You couldn’t hit a barn door with a water balloon!”

He didn’t believe himself. He knew it was only through a happy accident that the first Devastator formation had launched all five of its fish without scoring a hit. Already a second V was looping around to the west, making ready to strike.

“Captain, shall we order the crew into life jackets?” asked Marbles Rafferty.

“Sounds like a good idea,” said Ockham.

“Get the hell off the bridge,” Anthony snapped at the priest.

Rafferty pounded his palm with his fist. “Life jackets, sir. Life jackets…”

“Life jackets,” echoed Lia

“No,” muttered Anthony, setting the mike atop the Marisat terminal. “Remember Matagorda Bay? A sixty-yard gash in her hull, and still she didn’t sink. We can easily absorb a couple of obsolete torpedoes — I know we can.”

“They’ve got ten left,” noted Rafferty.

“Then we’ll absorb ten.”

“Anthony, you must believe me,” said Cassie. “I never thought they’d come after your ship.”

“War is hell, Doc.”

“I’m truly sorry.”

“I don’t doubt it. Fuck you.”

Remarkably, he could not bring himself to hate her. True, her duplicity was monumental, a betrayal to rank with that ignominious moment at Actium when Mark Antony had abandoned his own fleet in midbattle to go chasing after Cleopatra. And yet, at some weird, unfathomable level, he actually admired Cassie’s plot. Her audacity turned him on. There was nobody quite so arousing, he decided, as a worthy opponent.

The door to the starboard wing flew open and Dolores Haycox charged onto the bridge, gripping a walkie-talkie. “Forward lookout reports approaching vessel, sir — a ULCC, low riding, bearing three-two-nine.”

Anthony grunted. ULCC. Damn. Despite the blood transfusion, despite his quick and clever maneuvering through the bergs, he still hadn’t managed to outrun the Carpco Maracaibo. He snatched up the bridge binoculars and, peering through the frosted windshield, focused. He gasped. Not only was the Maracaibo a ULCC, she was a Persian Gulf tanker, heavy with formaldehyde but coming on fast. Her thorny profile shifted east and steamed past a berg shaped like a gigantic molar, on a direct course for God’s left ear.

“What’s that, a battleship?” asked Ockham.

“Not quite,” said Anthony, lowering the binoculars. “Your buddies in Rome are obviously serious about making me surrender the goods.” He pivoted toward his chief mate. “Marbles, if we got uncoupled from our cargo, these Devastators would have no reason to target us, right?”

“Right.”

“Then I propose we ring up the Maracaibo and ask her to shoot our chains apart.”

Rafferty smiled, an event so rare that Anthony knew the plan was sound. “At worst, the skipper turns us down,” noted the chief mate. “At best—”

“Oh, he’ll say yes, all right,” Ockham insisted. “Whatever Rome’s ultimate ambitions may be, she has no wish to see this ship go under.”

“Sparks, contact the Maracaibo” said Anthony, shoving the transceiver mike into Lia

“They shouldn’t be attacking your ship like this,” she said. “It isn’t right.”

Anthony was not surprised when, barely thirty seconds after Bliss ducked into the radio shack, the Maracaibo lashed out, shooting a Sea Dart guided missile toward the second Devastator formation. If Cassie’s story was true, he reasoned, then the forces represented by the World War Two Reenactment Society and those represented by the Gulf tanker had not been privy to each other’s machinations — but suddenly here they were, arriving simultaneously in the same unlikely sea, competing for the same unlikely prize.

“Hey, the Maracaibo can’t do that!” screamed Cassie. “She’s go

“Looks that way,” said Anthony dryly.

“This is murder!”

The instant the Devastators began their chaotic retreat, the V dissolving into five separate planes, Bliss piped the radio traffic onto the bridge.

“Scatter, boys!” screamed the formation leader. “Scatter! Scatter!”

“Christ, it’s on your tail, Commander Waldron!” a flier shouted.

“Mother of God!”

“Bail out, Commander!”

Anthony raised his hand and saluted in the general direction of the Gulf tanker.

“Tell the Maracaibo this is just a reenactment!” screamed Cassie. “Nobody’s supposed to be getting hurt!”

As Anthony tracked it with the binoculars, the lead torpedo plane shot straight across the Val’s weather deck, doggedly pursued by the near-sentient Sea Dart.

“Why’s the missile so poky?” asked Anthony.

“A heat seeker, designed to lock on modern jet exhaust,” Rafferty explained. “It’ll take ’er a while to realize she’s tracking an antique radial engine.”