Towing Jehovah

A loud knock. Then four, rat-a-tat-tat. Anthony ignored them. His visitor persisted.

“Yeah?”

“It’s Thomas. Open up.”

“Get away!”

“Suicide’s a sin, Anthony.”

“In whose eyes? His? They went to jelly two weeks ago.”

At least one of the losing admirals at Midway, he recalled, had done the honorable thing. Anthony hungered for the details. Had the poor defeated Jap chained himself to the helm? Had he changed his mind at the last minute but died anyway because nobody was around to unlock the manacle?

A new voice now. “Anthony, open the door. Something unbelievable has happened.”

“Cassie, get out! You’re on a sinking ship!”

“I just talked to the Maracaibo’s second mate, and he says her skipper is named Christopher Van Horne.”

Anthony’s migraine flared hotter than ever. “Get out!”

“Christopher Van Horne,” she said again. “Your father!”

“My father’s in Spain.”

“Your father’s a thousand yards to port. Open the door.”

A dark laugh rose from the depths of Anthony’s chest. Him? Dear old Dad? But of course, naturally, who else would the Vatican have picked to hunt down the Val and steal her cargo? He wondered how they’d lured him out of retirement. Money, most likely. (Columbus had been greedy too.) Or had the old man been seduced by the opportunity to humiliate his son once again?

“He wants to see you, Katsakos says.” Cassie sounded on the verge of tears.

“He wants to steal my cargo.”

“He’s in no shape to steal anything,” Ockham insisted. “He was out in the open when that bomb hit the Maracaibo.”

“He’s hurt?”

“Sounds pretty bad.”

“Is he assuming I’ll come?”

“He’s assuming you’ll go down with your ship,” said the priest. “ ‘The Van Hornes go down with their ships,’ he told Katsakos.”

“Then I mustn’t disappoint him.”

“Guess he knows you pretty well.”

“He doesn’t know me at all. Get back to the Maracaibo, both of you.”

“He tried to save the Val,” Cassie protested.

“I doubt that,” said Anthony.

“Open the door. Why do you think he cut your chains?”

“To take my cargo away.”

“To stop the torpedo strike. Why do you think he fired on the planes?”

“So they wouldn’t sink our cargo.”

“So they wouldn’t sink you. Ask Katsakos. Open the door.”

Anthony fixed on the starboard wall. He imagined God massaging the primordial continent, cleaving South America from Africa; he saw the new ocean, the Atlantic, pouring into the breach like amniotic fluid spilling from a ruptured birth sac. Was Cassie telling the truth? Had the old man’s Midway tactics really been intended to save the Val?

“I lost God.”

“Merely for the moment,” said Ockham. “You’ll finish this job yet.”

“Your father loves you,” said Cassie. “So do I, for that matter. Open the door.”

“The Val’s doomed,” said Anthony.

“Then you’ll have to hitch Him to the Maracaibo, won’t you?” said Ockham.

“The Maracaibo’s not mine.”

“That needn’t stop you.”

Anthony opened the door.

And there she stood, eyes moist and sunken, lips chapped, a band of frost spread across her brow like a diamond tiara. Lord, what a perfect match they were: two strong-willed people preoccupied with seven million tons of carrion, though for very different reasons.

“You love me, Cassie?”

“Against my better judgment.”

Taking his mirrorshades from the pocket of his parka, Anthony slipped them on and, turning, confronted Ockham with a dual reflection of his captain. “You really think we can resume the tow?”

“I’ve seen you pull bigger rabbits out of smaller hats,” said the priest.

“Okay, but first I’m goin’ to my cabin. I need some things. A Popeye the Sailor notebook…”

Ockham cringed. “Captain, the Val’s about to break apart.”

“A brass sextant,” said Anthony. “A bottle of burgundy.”

“Be quick about it.”

“The feather of an angel.”

“I can certainly see the resemblance,” said the agitated young man with the frozen stethoscope slung around his neck and the aluminum clipboard snugged against his chest. “The high forehead, the heavy jaw — you’re definitely your father’s son.”

“And my mother’s…” Anthony climbed past a rack of empty Crotale missile launchers and stepped onto the Maracaibo’s athwartships catwalk.

“Giuseppe Carminati,” said the physician. His ensemble included an officer’s cap with a red cross stitched above the brim and a ceremonial overcoat sporting gold buttons and epaulets, as if he’d just come from appearing in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta about shipboard surgeons. “Your father’s alive, but he can’t be moved. Our quartermaster’s attending him over by number three ballast tank. I believe you know the man. We picked him up in the Gibraltar Sea.”

“Neil Weisinger?” asked Ockham eagerly.

Wrapping his glove around the frosty bulb of his stethoscope, Carminati turned toward the priest. “Correct. Weisinger.” The physician smiled with the left side of his mouth. “Perhaps you remember me?”

“We’ve met?”

“Three months ago, in the Vatican screening room — I was Gabriel’s attending physician.” Carminati hugged himself. “I should be in Rome right now, listening to the Holy Father’s heart. I don’t function well in the cold.”

“You got many casualties?” asked Anthony.

“Compared with the original Midway, no. Twenty-one cases of acute hypothermia, most of them complicated by lacerations and broken bones, plus a noncombatant observer who got badly burned when his PBY caught fire.”

“Oliver Shostak?” asked Cassie in a fearful, repentant voice.

“Albert Flume,” said Carminati, consulting his clipboard. “Shostak, it seems, has a dislocated shoulder. You know him?”

“An old boyfriend. Dislocated shoulder, that’s all?”

“Superficial cuts, minor burns, treatable hypothermia.”

“And some people say there’s no God,” muttered Anthony.

“Expect to lose anyone?” asked Ockham.

“No, though the actor portraying Lieutenant Commander John Waldron, a man named” — Carminati glanced at the list — “Brad Keating, was vaporized when a missile hit his torpedo plane. Ditto his gu

“Dead?” Anthony steadied himself on the Crotale rack. No, God, please, the bastard couldn’t be checking out yet, not before shriving his son.

“Forgive my bluntness,” said Carminati. “It’s been a bad morning. I can promise you he’s in no pain. The Maracaibo carries more morphine than bunker fuel.”

“Anthony… I’m so sorry,” said Cassie. “These people Oliver hired, they’re obviously deranged. I never imagined…” The words froze in her throat.

The captain faced the bow, shouldered his knapsack, and marched down the Maracaibo’s central catwalk, passing over a vast tangle of valves and pipework spreading in all directions like exposed entrails. Reaching the fo’c’sle, he picked his way through the aftermath of the demolition bomb — buckled hatches, smashed bulwarks, melted Phalanx ca

Ever since the butane had gone into the gravy, Anthony had wondered exactly how he would behave when his father finally left the world. Would he snicker through the viewing? Pass out balloons at the funeral? Leave a lunger on the grave? He needn’t have worried. The instant he beheld Christopher Van Horne’s trapped and broken form, a flood of spontaneous pity poured through him.

Evidently the shock wave had lifted the old man from behind the Phalanx, flung him off the fo’c’sle, and dropped him beside the tank. There he lay, parka shredded, eyes closed, body imprisoned by an errant Hoffritz valve assembly, its ten-foot-long stem driven clear through the Butterworth plate, its huge circular handle — larger than a covered-wagon wheel — pressed tightly against his chest, pi