Towing Jehovah (36 page)

"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 Lianne Bliss's hand.

"Get her skipper on the line."

"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 gonna kill somebody!"

"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."

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 gunner!"

"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.

Déjà 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'Connor and make sure the boilers are okay. And let's get everybody into life jackets."

"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 announce that the
Valparaíso's
communications officer was trying to get in touch.

"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.

"Captain, if you cannot resist the temptation to fire your missiles, then we simply must leave," said Di Luca, face reddening. "Do you understand? I'm ordering you to turn this ship around."

"You mean retreat? Screw that, Eminence."

"The
cardinale
has a point," said Katsakos. "Maybe you noticed—these idiots still have six armed dive bombers over by the belly."

Even as the mate spoke, a Devastator pilot's agitated tones blasted from the bridge speaker. "Lieutenant Sharp to Commander McClusky. Come in, Commander."

"McClusky here," replied the leader of Air Group Six from his position above the omphalos.

"Sir, you got any eggs left?"

"One echelon's worth. We're about to unload 'em. Over."

"There's a Persian Gulf tanker on the field," said Sharp. "Any chance you could help us out?"

"Gulf tanker? Whoa! Spruance said there wouldn't be any screening vessels. Over."

"Guess he fibbed."

"We never done a Gulf tanker script, Sharp—nothin' that modern. Over."

"It's kickin' the shit out of us! We're down to just me and Beeson!"

"Christ. Okay, I'll see what we can do . . ."

Katsakos's golden Mediterranean skin acquired a decidedly greenish cast. "Sir, may I remind you we've got a full hold? If just
one
of McClusky's bombs connects, we'll go up like Hiroshima." A prickly sensation overtook Neil, a tingling such as he'd not experienced since getting gassed inside the
Val.
The dive bombers were coming, bearing their deadly matches. "I should've stayed in Jersey City," he told Di Luca. "I should've waited for another ship."

"We can always come back later and make sure the
Enterprise
pulled your son and his crew from their lifeboats," said Katsakos. "As for now . . ."

"Anthony Van Horne won't be crawling into any goddamn lifeboat," said the captain. "He'll be going down with his ship."

"Nobody does that anymore."

"The Van Hornes do."

Sighting through the bridge binoculars, Neil saw McClusky's Dauntless echelon abandon the belly and begin a steady climb, evidently intending to circle around and attack the
Maracaibo
from the rear.

"Mr. Peche," said the captain into the intercom mike, "kindly target the approaching dive bombers with Crotales." He grabbed a swatch of the second mate's pea jacket, twisting it like a tourniquet. "Who on board can operate a Phalanx cannon?"