Towing Jehovah (16 page)

"Zyklon
what?"
said Zook.

Neil freed up a pear-shaped mask. Frantically he strapped it in place. He reached out, arched his fingers around the valve, rotated his wrist. Stuck. He tried again. Stuck. Again. It moved! Half an inch. An inch. Two. Air! Closing his eyes, he inhaled, sucking the sweetness through his mouth—nose—pores. Air, glorious oxygen, an invisible poultice drawing the poison from his brain.

He opened his eyes. Kommandant Zook sat on the floor, skin pale as a mushroom, lips fluted in a moan. One hand held his mask in place. The other rested atop the tank, curled over the valve like a gigantic tick in the act of siphoning blood.

"Help me."

It took Neil several seconds to grasp Zook's predicament. The Nazi was completely immobile, frozen by some dreadful combination of brain damage and fear.

"Plague," said Neil. Dragging his oxygen tank behind him, he hobbled to Zook's side.

“P-please.”

Freedom rushed through Neil like a hit of cocaine. YHWH wasn't watching. No eyes on Neil. He could do whatever he felt like. Open the
Kommandant's
valve—or cut his hose in two. Give him a shot of oxygen from the functioning rig—or spit in his face. Anything. Nothing.

"Famine," said Neil.

The
Kommandant
stopped moaning. His jaw went slack. His eyes turned dull and milky, as if made of quartz.

"War," Neil whispered to Leo Zook's corpse.

From his breast pocket he drew out his Swiss Army knife. He pinched the spear blade, rotated it outward. He clenched the red handle; he stabbed; the blade pierced the rubber as easily as if it were soap. Laughing, reveling in his freedom, he carved a long, ragged incision along the axis of the Nazi's hose.

"Death."

Neil crouched beside the suffocated man, drank the delicious oxygen, and listened to the slow, steady thunder of the retreating horsemen.

Plague

FOR OLIVER SHOSTAK, learning that the illusory deity of Judeo-Christianity had once actually inhabited the heavens and the earth, running reality and dictating the Bible, was hands-down the worst experience of his life. On the scale of disillusionment, it far outranked his deduction at age five that Santa Glaus was a mountebank, his discovery at seventeen that his father was routinely screwing the woman who boarded the family's Weimaraners, and the judgment he'd suffered on his thirty-second birthday when he'd asked the curator of the Castelli Gallery in SoHo to exhibit the highlights of his abstract-expressionist period. ("The great drawback of these paintings," the stiff-necked old lady had replied, "is that they aren't any good.") But the fruits of Pamela Harcourt's recent expedition could not be denied: a dozen full-color photographs, each showing a large, male, grinning, supine body being towed by its ears northward through the Atlantic Ocean. The 30 X 40 blowups hung in the west lounge of Montesquieu Hall like ancestral portraits—which, in a manner of speaking, they were.

"Our labors of late have been, if I may speak mythologically, Herculean," Barclay Cabot began, his haggard face breaking into a yawn. "Our itinerary included stops in Asia, Europe, the Middle East . . ." Oliver fixed on the blowups. He loathed them. No feminist forced to sit through a Linda Lovelace film festival had ever felt more offended. Yet he refused to admit defeat. Indeed, on receiving Pamela's dire bulletin from Dakar he'd swung into action immediately, deputizing Barclay to form an ad hoc committee and lead it on a frantic journey around the world.

Winston Hawke finished off a petit four, wiping his hands on his Trotsky sweatshirt. "After eighty-four hours of unbroken effort, our team has reached a sobering conclusion." Rising, Barclay slipped a sheet of legal paper out of his waistcoat pocket. "By presenting yourself as the agent of a foreign government eager to prevent its financial resources from falling into the wrong hands . .

."

"Its own people, for example," said Winston.

". . . you can, these days, obtain almost any tool of mass destruction that catches your fancy. To be specific"—Barclay perused the legal paper—"the French Ministry of Defense was prepared to rent us a
Robespierre-
class
attack submarine equipped with eighteen forward-launched torpedoes. The Iranian State Department proposed to sell us the nine million gallons of Vietnam-surplus napalm it acquired from the American CIA in 1976, plus ten F-15 Eagle fighter jets with which to dispense it. The Argentine Navy offered us a two-month lease on the battleship
Eva Peron,
and if we'd closed the deal on the spot, they'd have thrown in six thousand rounds of ammunition for free. Finally, as long as we agreed to keep the source a secret, the People's Republic of China would've given us what they called a

'package deal' on a tactical nuclear weapon and the delivery system of our choice."

"Every one of these offers fell through the minute the merchants learned we did not in fact represent a sovereign state." Winston selected a second petit four. "It's immoral and destabilizing, they said, for private citizens to possess such technologies."

"The sole dissenter from this policy was itself a private institution, the American National Rifle Association," said Barclay. "But the things they wanted to sell us—four MHO howitzers and seven wire-guided TOW missiles—are useless for our purposes."

Oliver groaned softly. He'd been hoping for a more encouraging report: not simply because he wished to impress Cassandra, whose fax had clearly contained a subtext—
prove yourself,
she was saying between the lines,
show me you're a man of substance
— but also because he truly wanted to spare his species a millennium of theistic ignorance and mindless superstition.

"So we're licked?" asked Pamela.

"There is one ray of hope," said Winston, devouring the tiny cake. "This afternoon we spoke with—"

The Marxist stopped in midsentence, stunned by the ascent of Sylvia Endicott, a surge so abrupt it was as if the springs of her Empire chair had suddenly popped free. "Have I missed something?" the old woman demanded in a low, liquid hiss. "Did I fail to attend a crucial meeting? Was I out of town during an emergency session? When, exactly, did we agree on this sabotage business?"

"We never put it to a formal vote," Oliver replied, "but clearly that's the consensus in the room."

"Not in
this
part of the room."

"What are you saying, Sylvia?" snarled Pamela. " 'Sit back and do nothing'?"

"The Svalbard tomb can hardly be a secure place," Meredith Lodge hastened to add. "Hell, I suspect it's vulnerable as Cheops's pyramid."

"Obliteration's the only answer," said Rainsford Fitch.

Scowling profoundly, Sylvia shuffled to the bust of Charles Darwin stationed by the fireplace.

"Assuming for a moment the
Valparaíso
is really towing what Cassie Fowler says it's towing," she began,

"shouldn't we have the collective courage, if not the simple decency, to admit we've been
wrong
all these years?"

"Wrong?" said Rainsford.

"Yes. Wrong."

"That's a rather extreme word," said Barclay.

"It's probably time to amend our charter," said Taylor Scott, puffing on a Turkish cigarette, "but we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The theistic world was a nightmare, Sylvia. Have you forgotten the Renaissance witch hunts?"

"But we're not being
honest."

"The trial of Galileo? The massacre of the Incas?"

"I haven't forgotten those things, nor have I forgotten the scientific curiosity that is the
sine qua non
of this organization." Sylvia tightened her woolen shawl, her primary protection against the ersatz winter raging through Montesquieu Hall. "We should be
studying
this corpse, not sweeping it under the rug."

"Let's look at it from another angle," said Winston. "Yes, some sort of large entity is currently being hauled toward the Arctic, and for all we know this entity hung the stars, spun the earth, and molded Adam out of clay. But does that mean it's
God?
The unmoved mover? The first and final cause? The be-all and end-all? It's
dead,
for Christ's sake. What kind of Supreme Being goes belly up like that?"

"A fake Supreme Being," said Rainsford.

"Exactly," said Winston. "A fake, a fraud, a phony. The problem, of course, is that such logic will never impress the credulous masses. A relic like this becomes yet another confirmation of their faith. Ergo, for the good of all, in the name of reason, this God-who-isn't-God must be removed."

"Winston, you appall me." Arms akimbo, Sylvia aimed her blighted corneas directly at the Marxist.

"Reason, you said? 'The name of reason'? This isn't
reason
you're doling out—it's atheist fundamentalism!"

"Let's not play with words."

Sylvia tore off the shawl, hobbled into the foyer, and yanked open the front door. "Ladies and gentlemen, you leave me no other choice!" she foamed as the July heat wafted into the frigid lounge. "Honor dictates but one course for me—I must resign from the Central Park West Enlightenment League!"

"Lighten up, Sylvia," said Pamela.

The old woman stepped into the steamy night. "Got that, you intellectual pharisees?" she called over her shoulder. "I'm quitting—forever!"

Oliver's innards contracted. His throat grew dry. Sylvia, goddamn it, had a point.

"The sack of Jerusalem!" wailed Winston as the door slammed shut.

"The siege of Belfast!" howled Rainsford.

"The slaughter of the Huguenots!" screamed Meredith.

A point—but that was
all
Sylvia had, Oliver decided, a mere rational argument, and meanwhile the woods were burning.

"Let's hear about that ray of hope," said Pamela.

Barclay strode to the hearth, warming his hands over the roiling flames. "You've probably never heard of Pembroke and Flume's World War Two Reenactment Society, but it's pretty much what the name implies—a couple of ambitious young impresarios who buy up mothballed B-17s and battleships and such. They hire hungry actors, unemployed merchant sailors, and discharged Navy fliers, then travel around simulating the major encounters between the Axis and the Allies."

"Last summer, Pembroke and Flume put on their version of Rommel's Africa campaign, substituting the Arizona desert for Tunisia," said Winston, joining Barclay by the fire. "The winter before, they did the Ardennes counteroffensive in the Catskills. This year, as it happens, is the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Midway, so they've got a Hollywood crew working up on Martha's Vineyard, reconstructing the entire base out of Styro-foam and plywood. On August first, dozens of classic Japanese warplanes will take off from three-quarter-scale fiberglass facsimiles of the carriers
Akagi, Soryu, Hiryu,
and
Kaga,
then bomb the base to smithereens. The next day, all four Jap flattops will be sunk by a squadron of dive bombers from the vintage American carrier
Enterprise
—the pride of Pembroke and Flume's collection."

"Which is actually something of a cheat," said Barclay. "The
Yorktown
and the
Hornet
also sent planes, but Pembroke and Flume are operating on a budget. On the other hand, they do use live bombs. The audience gets its money's worth."

"Bread and circuses," said Winston, sneering. "Only in late-capitalist America, eh?"

"The relevant fact is this: once they're done with Midway, Pembroke and Flume have no immediate prospects," said Barclay. "They'll be eager to let us hire 'em."

"Hire 'em to do what?" asked Meredith.

"Restage the battle all over again—with fresh ammunition. Between their dive bombers and their torpedo planes, we're pretty sure they can deliver enough TNT to scuttle Van Horne's cargo." A quick, delicious thrill shot through Oliver as, rising from his meridienne daybed, he marched across the Aubusson carpet to the bust of Darwin. He liked this Midway business. He liked it very much. "What'll they charge us?"

"They quoted a few rough figures at lunch," said Winston, scanning a ragged 3X5 card. "Salaries, food, gasoline, bombs, lawyers, insurance riders . . ."

"And the bottom line?"

"Gimme a minute." Winston's index finger danced along the keyboard of his pocket calculator. "Sixteen million, two hundred and twenty thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars."

"Think we can get 'em down to fifteen?" asked Oliver, sliding his thumb across the marble furrows of Darwin's frown. Not that it mattered. If his sister could squander her trust fund collecting Abraham Lincoln memorabilia and his brother could piss away his making cornball biographical movies about major-league baseball stars, Oliver was not about to balk at financing so worthy a project as this.

"Damn good chance of it," Winston replied. "I mean, these clowns really
need
us. They practically lost their shirts on Pearl Harbor."

July 28.

Midnight. Latitude: 30°6'N. Longitude: 22°12'W. Course: 015. Speed: 6 knots. Wind: 4 on the Beaufort. Heading north across the Cape Verde Abyssal Plain, the Canaries to starboard, the Azores dead ahead, Ursa Minor directly above.

This afternoon, in preparation for the blood transfer, we tried piercing His right carotid artery with a series of interconnected chicksans—"the world's biggest hypodermic needle," as Crock O'Connor put it. A disaster. Ten feet below the epidermis, He becomes hard as iron. Easier to rupture a football with a banana.

Assuming there's no mutiny in the meantime, we'll try again tomorrow.

You think I'm kidding about a mutiny, Popeye? I'm not.

Something strange is happening aboard the
Carpco Valparaíso.
Every time Bud Ramsey organizes a poker game, one of the players cheats and the whole affair turns into a bloody brawl. Graffiti's been appearing on the bulkheads faster than I can order it sandblasted away: JESUS IS COMING IN HIS

PANTS, and worse.

(I'm not a religious man, but I won't have that kind of crap on my ship.) The deckies are constantly smoking near the cargo bays, thus breaking the first rule of oil-tanker safety. Marbles Rafferty informs me that not an hour goes by without somebody pounding on his door to report a theft. Wallets, cameras, radios, knives.