Towing Jehovah (24 page)

Oliver slept badly that evening—Winston's cyclonic snoring combined with the challenge of digesting overpriced ptarmigan stew—rousing himself the next morning only with the aid of the Gabler's strongest coffee. At eight o'clock, Jan Mayen time, the atheists trudged past the city limits and entered the trackless tundra beyond.

After an hour's hike they paused for lunch, spreading out their picnic on the narrow neck of rock marking the way to Upper Mayen. The cheese was moldy, the milk sour, the jerky tough and gritty. Inevitably Oliver imagined Anthony Van Horne's cargo fashioning this particular isthmus: the gigantic hands reaching down from heaven, pinching the island in the middle. The vision alarmed and depressed him. What would the scientists back in Ibsen City do if they ever found out that their elaborate theories of uniformitarianism and plate tectonics were fundamentally meaningless? How would they react upon learning that the
real
answer to the geomorphic riddle was, of all things, divine intervention?

Crossing into Upper Mayen, the three men followed a pumice-covered path through the foothills of the Carolus Mountains, a journey made entertaining by a particularly dazzling performance from the aurora borealis. Had Oliver brought his art supplies along, he would have tried painting the phenomenon, laboring to capture on canvas its diaphanous arcs, ethereal swirls, and eerie crimson flickers. At last Eylandt Fjord lay before them, a smooth expanse of steel blue water irregularly punctuated by gigantic chunks of floating pack ice. Oliver's great fear was that the
Enterprise
would be delayed and they would have to camp on the tundra, so his mood brightened considerably when he saw her lying at anchor, four PBY flying boats tethered to her stern. His joy did not last. The carrier looked old, feeble, small. She
was
small, he knew: smaller than the
Valparaíso
by half, smaller than God by a factor of twenty. The five dozen warplanes strapped to her flight deck did not seem remotely equal to the task at hand.

Barclay worked his portable semaphore, sending bursts of electric light across the fjord. G-O-D-H-E-A-D, the code name for their campaign.

The
Enterprise
replied: W-E-A-R-E-C-O-M-I-N-G.

The atheists scrambled down the cliff face, a treacherous descent through slippery patches of moss, jagged chunks of pumice, and a thorny, mean-spirited plant that tore their mukluks and bloodied their ankles. They reached the beach simultaneously with the carrier's barge: a wooden inboard motorboat sporting a canvas canopy over her helm and flying a historically accurate 48-star flag. Dressed in a
Memphis Belle
bomber jacket, Sidney Pembroke sat on the foredeck, waving a mittened hand.

"Welcome to Point Luck!" Condensed breath gushed from Pembroke's mouth. Even with the Arctic air flushing his cheeks, he still looked anemic. "Hop aboard, men!"

"There's plenty of piping hot Campbell's tomato soup back on
Enterprise,"
called Albert Flume, also bloodless, from behind the wheel. "Mmm, mmm, good!" He'd traded his zoot suit for the saboteur look: vicuña vest, blue crewneck sweater, black watch cap, like Anthony Quinn in
The Guns of Navarone.
Wrapping a calfskin bombardier's glove around the throttle, Flume eased the motor into neutral. Beside him stood a granite-jawed, swag-bellied man wearing the unassuming khaki uniform of an American naval officer in the process of winning World War Two. Admirals' stars decorated his shoulders. Oliver waded into the shallows, wincing as the icy water gushed through the rips in his mukluks, and climbed over the transom, Barclay and Winston right behind. The Navy man ducked out from under the canopy and smiled, an unlit briar pipe clamped between his teeth.

"You must be Mr. Shostak," said the admiral, subjecting Oliver to a strenuous handshake. "Spruance here, Ray Spruance. I use your dad's brand of rubber all the time. Boy, I'll bet this AIDS thing's been a real boon to your family, right? It's an ill wind that blows nobody good." Oliver grimaced and said, "These are my colleagues—Barclay Cabot, Winston Hawke."

"Pleasure's all mine, fellas."

"What's your actual name?" asked Winston, beating back a smirk.

"Doesn't matter, Mr. Hawke. For the next two weeks, I'm Raymond A. Spruance, rear admiral, U.S. Navy, charged with the tactical side of this operation."

"As opposed to the strategic?" asked Oliver. He was beginning to understand how these idiots thought.

"Yep. Strategy's Admiral Nimitz, back at Pearl Harbor."

"Where's Nimitz really?"

"New York," said Flume.

"We're not
paying
him, are we?" asked Oliver.

"Of course we're paying him." Putting the motor in gear, Flume guided the barge away from the beach.

"Why are we paying him if he's not doing anything?"

"He
is
doing something."

"What?"

"Ray just told you. Strategy."

"But we
know
the strategy."

"Look, boys," said Spruance's portrayer, whipping the briar pipe from his mouth, "if I couldn't picture old Chesty Nimitz back at Pearl, planning our strategy, I wouldn't have the heart to go through with this."

"But he's
not
at Pearl," said Oliver. "He's in New York."

"We could send him to Pearl if you wanted," said Flume, "but it'd cost you a pretty penny." Biting his tongue, Oliver said nothing.

"You know, I'd never heard of vigilante capitalism until Sidney and Albert told me about it"—Spruance offered the atheists a sly, conspiratorial wink—"but I must say, I'm impressed."

"Some folks think we're out of line," said Winston, "but that won't stop us from doing our patriotic duty."

"Hey, you needn't persuade
me,"
said Spruance. "For
years
I been sayin' the Nips are a bigger threat to America right now than they ever were in '42."

As Flume piloted them across the fjord, Pembroke climbed off the foredeck, wiped a dollop of eider-duck guano from his bomber jacket, and drew up beside Winston. "So how do you like Task Force Sixteen?" Pembroke asked, pointing toward the
Enterprise.

"I see only one ship," said Winston.

"Well, it's a task force to
us,"
said Pembroke in an aggrieved tone. "Task Force Sixteen. We've got
Enterprise,
her barge, four PBYs . . ."

"Right."

"A task force, yes?"

"You bet."

"Things go okay on Martha's Vineyard?" asked Barclay.

"Beautiful," said Pembroke. "A sell-out crowd."

"We watched it all from Dad's cabin cruiser," said Flume. "A regular ringside seat."

"Alby brought along the most amazing picnic."

"Everything's better with the Battle of Midway raging all around you."

"Potato salad's better. Chocolate cake's better."

"Except
Soryu
—wouldn't you know it?—she didn't sink," said Flume, carefully maneuvering the barge alongside the carrier.

"Oh?" said Oliver.

"Yeah, she stayed afloat even after McClusky unloaded one of his eggs right down her aft smokestack," said Spruance. "Hey, don't get worried, son. We'll be dropping fifty times more TNT on your golem than we did on
Soryu."
The admiral vaulted athletically from the barge to the gangway. "Best torpedoes and demolition bombs in the whole damn navy. State-of-the-art ordnance." Disembarking, Oliver followed Spruance up the wobbly stairs, a route that took them directly past an open hangar bay. A middle-aged sailor in an ensign's uniform stood hunched over the fuselage of a TBD-1 Devastator, tinkering with the engine.

"The way we figure it," said Oliver, calling above the growl of the pack ice, "the
Valparaíso
won't cross the circle till five or six days from now."

"Okay, but we'd better start sending patrols out right away, just to make sure," said Spruance. "Our PBYs will get the job done. State-of-the-art reconnaissance."

"Any danger of the
Val
slipping past us?"

Spruance looked Oliver in the eye. The Arctic wind tousled the admiral's dapple-gray hair. "A PBY is the finest search plane of its day, Mr. Shostak. Understand? The finest of its day."

"What day?"

"Nineteen forty-two."

"But it's nineteen
ninety-two."

"That's a matter of opinion. Anyway, we got brand-new radar equipment on
Enterprise's
bridge."

"State-of-the-art radar?" Oliver was feeling better now. The Devastator was a truly fearsome-looking machine. It radiated a kind of technological haughtiness, metal's contempt for flesh.

"State-of-the-art radar," echoed Ray Spruance's portrayer with an emphatic thumbs-up. "Panasonic all the way."

A low, steady growl. A sharp, gut-deep ache. Hunger? wondered Neil Weisinger, cracking into consciousness. Yes, that was the word,
hunger.

Freeing himself from the knot of sleeping, snoring bodies, the young AB glanced at his digital watch. August 10. Wednesday. Nine A.M. Damn, he'd been asleep two whole days. His eyes itched. His bladder spasmed. Slowly he picked his way through the wreckage—the Miller Lite cans and Cook's champagne bottles, the chicken bones and eggshells, the raunchy CDs and X-rated videocassettes—and, after walking stark naked through the southern arcade, peed copiously on a lovely bucolic fresco depicting a herd of rams gang-banging a buxom shepherdess.

"Quite a blowout," groaned Charlie Horrocks, joining Neil at the improvised urinal.

"The social event of the season," mumbled Neil. Lord, it was glorious being a pagan. The choices were so simple. Vodka, rum, or beer? Oral, anal, or vaginal?

"Somebody's been playin' football with my head," said the pumpman.

"Somebody's been playin' billiards with my balls," said Neil. Their revels, clearly, had ended, though whether this was because even pagans grow weary of pleasure or because the party had run out of fuel (no more beer in the kegs, soup in the kettles, bread in the baskets, jism in the testes), the AB couldn't say. "What's for breakfast?"

"Beats me."

In the western arcade, a large and resonant stomach grumbled. Another took up the cry. A third joined in. A choral gurgling filled the air, as if the museum were honeycombed with defective storm drains. Stumbling aimlessly toward the banquet table, Neil grew suddenly aware of how encrusted he was, how wide the variety of dried substances clinging to his skin and matting his hair. He felt like an extension of the island itself, a repository for waste.

"I could eat a cow," said Juanita Torres, slipping into a silk chemise.

"A herd of cows," said Ralph Mungo. "A
generation
of cows." But there were no cattle on Van Horne Island.

"Hey, we got ourselves a problem here," said Dolores Haycox, the ranking officer among the deserters now that Joe Spicer had been disemboweled with a stockless anchor. She spoke tentatively, as if uncertain whether to assume command or not. Should she elect to do so, Neil decided, she'd best put on some clothes. "I think we ought to, you know, talk," rasped the third mate. Potable water, everyone agreed, wasn't an issue: the omnipresent fog continually deposited gallons of dew in the city's various cisterns and gutters. Food was a different matter. Even with stringent rationing, there probably weren't enough provisions left to satisfy their appetites for more than a day.

"Jeez ... I feel so
stupid,"
said Mungo.

"Stupid, stupid, stupid," said Torres.

"Stupid as an ox," said Ramsey.

"If we dwell on the past," said Haycox, slinging a tattered canvas seabag around her waist, "we'll go mad."

Ramsey wanted them to start scouring the island immediately. Despite its seeming sterility, he argued, the place might very well harbor a few stranded crustaceans or an edible species of kelp. But the revelers had seen far too many acres of lifeless mud and barren sand to work up much enthusiasm for this idea. Horrocks suggested they go back to the
Valparaíso
and beg for a portion of whatever scraps they might have overlooked while looting the ship. This scenario sounded promising until James Echohawk pointed out that, if any such supplies existed, the loyalists had no reason to be generous with them. It was Haycox who offered genuine hope. They must fashion a raft from the banquet table, she argued, and send it east. After reaching civilization—Portugal, most probably, though maybe Morocco was nearer—its crew would hunt out the authorities and arrange for a rescue ship to be dispatched. If the raft proved incapable of such a journey, her crew would return forthwith to Van Horne Island, laden with the deep-sea fish they were certain to catch along the way. On Haycox's orders the deserters got dressed and spent the morning scavenging. They cut the fat from hambones, dug pulp out of apricot pits, clawed bits of egg from shell fragments, pried globs of Chef Boyardee ravioli from steel cans, and chiseled nuggets of pizza from the flagstones. Once the museum itself was picked clean, the mariners retraced their steps to the amphitheater, following the path of their prodigality, gathering up each orange rind and banana peel as if it were a priceless gem. Entering the arena, Neil was momentarily bewildered to realize that the corpses of Wheatstone, Jaworski, and Spicer were nowhere to be seen, but then he noticed a mound of mud in the center of the field, evidence that someone—Father Thomas, quite likely—had buried them. An unholy odor rose from the grave, so intense it instantly killed any notion of solving the incipient famine through the ingestion of former shipmates.

By 1530 the pagans were back in the city, sorting through the day's harvest. It came to a little over thirty pounds, which Haycox divided into two equal stockpiles, storing the first in a seabag—bait, she explained—and parceling out the second on the spot. Greedily Neil grabbed his allotment, a conglomeration of apple cores, Concord grapes, and frankfurter stubs welded together with Turkish taffy and melted cheddar cheese. Staking out a shady spot beneath the banquet table, he sat down, lit a Marlboro, and puffed.

He stared at his meal. A sharp moan broke from his larynx. This wasn't food. It was a travesty of food, a cruel impersonation of food, tormenting him the way a dead child's voice torments its parents. He devoured the ration in four big bites.