Towing Jehovah

With an odd mixture of pure horror and indefensible fascination, Anthony watched the missile home in. An explosion brightened the steely sky, vaporizing the Devastator’s two-man crew and disintegrating her fuselage, the thousand flaming shards flashing through the air like a migraine aura.

From the bridge speaker a flier screamed, “They got Commander Waldron! Waldron and his gu

“Christ!”

“Just like in ’42!”

“Lousy bastards!”

“Dirty Japs!”

“The Maracaibo doesn’t answer,” said Bliss, rushing out of the radio shack.

“Keep trying to raise her.”

“She’s stonewalling us, sir.”

“I said keep trying!”

As Bliss returned to her post, two more missiles leapt from the Maracaibo, a svelte French Crotale and a delicate Italian Aspide, speeding toward the third Devastator formation. Seconds later came the roaring vermilion glare of the exploding Crotale, outshining the midnight sun and bursting the lead plane apart, followed by the shrieking, swirling, red-and-purple plumage of the Aspide, setting its target aflame. Four white parachutes blossomed above the Norwegian Sea, gently lowering their riders toward death by hypothermia.

“Holy shit, the crews bailed out,” said Rafferty.

“God help them,” said Ockham.

“No, we’ll help them,” said Anthony, snapping up the intercom mike and tuning in the bos’n’s quarters. “Van Horne to Mungo.”

“Mungo here.”

“There’re four men in the water, bearing two-nine-five. Drop a lifeboat, pick ’em up, give ’em hot showers, and stand by to rescue anybody else who jumps.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Once again Dolores Haycox popped in from the wing. “Starboard lookout reports torpedo wake approaching, sir, bearing two-one-zero.”

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.

Dйjа 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’Co

“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 a

“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.