Towing Jehovah (33 page)

The forward hangar bay was astonishingly hot, a phenomenon that evidently traced to the seven kerosene stoves roaring and snorting along the amidships bulkhead. Sweat popped onto Oliver's brow, rolling downward and stinging his eyes. Instinctively he stripped, taking off his Karakorum parka, cashmere scarf, cowhide gloves, and Navy watch cap.

"Tactics." Removing his
Memphis Belle
bomber jacket, Pembroke swept his bare arm across the cavernous bay.

"Exactly." Flume pulled off his blue crewneck sweater. "Strategy's the soul of war, but never underestimate the power of tactics."

The bay was jammed to the walls, plane stacked against plane, their wings folded like the arms of defeated infantrymen bent in surrender. Dressed in shorts and T-shirts, maintenance crews bustled about, chocking wheels, popping out instrument panels, poking around inside engines. A few yards away, two nervous-looking sailors rolled back the steel door to the powder magazine, gently picked up a 500-pound demolition bomb, and set it on a hand-operated trolley.

"American carrier planes are traditionally stored on the flight deck," said Pembroke.

"As opposed to the Jap convention of keeping 'em on the hangar deck," said Flume.

"By bringing both squadrons below, Admiral Spruance has thawed every rudder, flap, and gas line."

"Come dawn, he's gonna start all the engines down here. Imagine: starting your engines in your hangar bays—what a brilliant tactic!"

The bomb handlers dollied their charge across the bay and, as if returning a baby to the womb, stuffed it into the fuselage of an SBD-2 Dauntless.

"Say, you folks
are
planning to come, aren't you?" asked Flume.

"Come?" said Oliver.

"To the battle. Ensign Reid's agreed to fly us out in Strawberry Eleven."

"This isn't my sort of thing," said Barclay.

"Oh, you
must
come," said Pembroke.

"Marx never cared for battles," said Winston. "I don't either, especially."

"What about you, Oliver?"

The Enlightenment League's president took out his monogrammed linen handkerchief and wiped the perspiration from his forehead. If he worked at it, he could easily have discouraged himself, conjuring up fantasies of Strawberry Eleven crashing into an iceberg or being blown apart by a stray demolition bomb. But the final truth was this: he wanted to be able to tell Cassandra he was there, right there, when the Corpse of Corpses went into the Mohns Trench.

"I wouldn't miss it for the world."

The next morning at 0600, Spruance's pilots and gunners crowded into the carrier's stuffy, smoke-filled briefing room. Oliver immediately thought of the Episcopalian services to which his parents had periodically dragged him back home in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania; there was the same weighty silence, the same restless reverence, the same mood of people getting ready to receive the lowdown on matters of life and death. The hundred and thirty-two war reenactors sat at rigid attention, parachute packs balanced on their laps like hymnals.

Ramrod straight, chest puffed out, Spruance's portrayer slipped his briar pipe between his teeth, ascended the podium, and, grabbing the sash cord, unfurled a hand-drawn overhead view of the body in question, cryptic grin included. "Our objective, gentlemen: the insidious Oriental golem. Code name,

'Akagi.' " The corpse was sketched with its limbs spread-eagled, evoking da Vinci's famous
Vitruvian
Man.
"Nimitz's strategy calls for a series of coordinated strikes against two separate targets." Lifting the pointer from the chalk tray, the admiral jabbed it into the Adam's apple. "Our torpedo squadron will concentrate on this area here, Target A, hitting the region between the second and third cervical vertebrae and creating a rupture descending from the epidermis to the center of the throat. If we've calculated correctly, Akagi will then begin shipping water, much of it flowing down the windpipe and into the lungs. Meanwhile, Scout Bombing Six will drop its payloads on the midriff, systematically enlarging this depression here—Target B, the navel—until the abdominal cavity is breached." Clamping his pointer under his arm like a riding crop, Spruance faced the air group's leader. "We'll attack in alternating waves. Toward this end, Commander McClusky, you will divide each squadron into two sections. While one section's over its designated target, the other will be getting refueled and rearmed back here on Mother Goose. Questions?"

Lieutenant Lance Sharp, a paunchy, balding man with a tiny smear of brown mustache on his upper lip, raised his hand. "What sort of resistance might we expect?"

"The PBYs report a total absence of fighter planes and AA artillery on both
Valparaíso
and the golem. However, let's not forget who constructed this sucker. I calculate the enemy will launch a fighter umbrella of between twenty and thirty Zeroes."

Lieutenant Commander E. E. Lindsey, a tense Virginian who bore a startling resemblance to Richard Widmark, spoke up next. "Will they really launch a fighter umbrella?"

"That's basic carrier tactics, mister."

"But will they
really?"

"They launched a hell of a fighter umbrella on June 4, 1942, didn't they?" Spruance chomped on his pipe.

"Well, no, they won't
really
launch a fighter umbrella," he added, more than a little annoyed.

"Question about technique, Admiral," said Wade McClusky. "Shall we dive-bomb, or would glide-bombing be best?"

"If I were you, given the inexperience of my pilots, I'd opt for glide-bombing."

"My pilots aren't inexperienced. They're perfectly capable of dive-bombing."

"They weren't experienced in '42." Spruance slid his pointer along the left breast. "And be sure to come in from the east. That way the AA gunners'll be blinded by the sun."

"What
AA gunners?" asked Lindsey.

"The Jap AA gunners," said Spruance.

"This is the Arctic, sir," said McClusky. "The sun rises in the south, not the east." For a moment Spruance looked confused, then a smile to match Akagi's spread across his face. "Say, let's take advantage of that! Attack from the south, and dive-bomb the hell out of em!

"Don't you mean, glide-bomb the hell out of 'em?" said McClusky.

"Your boys can't dive-bomb?"

"They couldn't in '42, sir. They can today."

"I think you should dive-bomb, don't you, Commander?"

"I do, sir," said McClusky.

Spruance lanced his pointer into Akagi's right side. "Okay, boys, let's show those slant-eyed bastards how to fight a war!"

At 0720, Ensign Jack Reid's handsome, toothy portrayer guided Oliver, Pembroke, Flume, and the burly actor playing Ensign Charles Eaton into the barge and ferried them out to Strawberry Eleven. Reid eased himself into the pilot's seat. Eaton assumed the copilot's position. After hunkering down in their machine-gun blisters, Pembroke and Flume swapped their parkas for matching mauve flak jackets, then slipped on their headsets, opened an aluminum cooler, and began removing the raw materials of a picnic: checkered tablecloth, paper napkins, plastic forks, bottles of vintage Rheingold, Tupperware containers filled with treats from the
Enterprise's
galley. Within minutes the PBY flying boat was moving, climbing toward the gauzy midnight sun. Field glasses in hand, Oliver crawled through the unoccupied compartments, eventually settling on the mechanic's station; it was a cramped space, mottled with rust and flaking paint (poor Sidney and Albert, he thought, they could never really recover the forties, only its disintegrating remains), but the large window afforded a sweeping vista of sea and sky. For better or worse, this coign of vantage also lay within hearing distance of the impresarios.

"Look, Captain Murray's turning
Enterprise
into the wind," Pembroke told Oliver as the carrier swung slowly east.

"Standard procedure for launching a squadron," Flume elaborated. "With such a short runway, you want lotsa wind under everybody's wings."

Ensign Reid brought the PBY to two thousand feet, then leveled her off and looped around, giving his passengers a clear view of the flight deck. Dressed in green anoraks, a foul-weather crew scurried about, chopping the ice apart with pickaxes and pushing the fragments over the side with coal shovels. A yellow-suited firehose crew finished the job, aiming their nozzles at the runway and letting loose torrents of liquid de-icer.

"Here comes Torpedo Six," said Pembroke as, wings folded, two Devastators rode their respective elevators to the flight deck.

Taking care not to be swept overboard by the prop wash, a quartet of blue-suited plane handlers ran to the forward Devastator, 6-T-9, unchocking the wheels and spreading the wings, whereupon the pilot turned 180 degrees and taxied amidships. As the signal officer waved his batons, the pilot turned again, revved his engine, and sped down the runway, de-icer spewing from his wheels. Oliver half expected the plane to crash into the sea, but instead some God-made law took over—the Bernoulli effect, he believed it was called—lifting 6-T-9 off the bow and high above the waves.

"The Devastators need a head start over the dive bombers," Pembroke explained as 6-T-ll joined her airborne twin. Both planes circled the carrier, awaiting the rest of their section. "Slow devils, those Devastators. They were obsolete even before the first one rolled off the assembly line." Oliver exhaled sharply, fogging the mechanic's window. "Obsolete? Oh?"

"Hey, not to worry, fella," said Pembroke.

"Your golem's good as dead," said Flume.

"And if worst comes to worst, we've always got Op Plan 29-67."

"Exactly. Op Plan 29-67."

"What's Op Plan 29-67?" asked Oliver.

"You'll see."

"You'll love it."

Two by two, the Devastators continued to arrive, taxiing, revving, taking off. By 0815 the entire first-strike section of Torpedo Six was aloft, fifteen planes arranging themselves into three V-shaped formations. A delicious inevitability hung in the air, a sense of Rubicons crossed and bridges burned, like nothing Oliver had experienced since he and Sally Morgenthau had relieved each other of their respective virginities following a Grateful Dead concert in 1970. My God, he'd thought at the time—my God, we're actually doing it.

"Let's hit the road, Ensign," Flume barked into his intercom mike. "We mustn't be late for the ball." Turning the control yoke thirty degrees, Jack Reid's portrayer pushed back on the throttle. Oliver, pulse racing (actually doing it, actually doing it), put on his headset. Pembroke leafed through a wartime issue of
Stars and Stripes.
Flume opened a Tupperware container and removed a Spam-and-onion sandwich. Over the intercom, Ensign Eaton's portrayer whistled "Embraceable You." Strawberry Eleven flew alongside the sun, soaring at seventy knots above a range of mammoth icebergs as she chased Lieutenant Commander Lindsey's brave squadron east across the Norwegian Sea.

In his short but busy career as an able-bodied seaman, Neil Weisinger had helmed every sort of merchant ship imaginable, from reefers to Great Lakes freighters, bulk carriers to Ro-Ros, but he'd never before taken the wheel of anything so weird as the SS
Carpco Maracaibo.

"Come right to zero-two-zero," commanded the officer on duty, Mick Katsakos, a swarthy Cretan in white bell-bottoms, an oil-stained parka, and a Greek fisherman's cap.

"Right to zero-two-zero," echoed Neil, working the wheel.

He'd certainly heard of such vessels, these Persian Gulf tankers outfitted with an eye to the political realities of the Middle East. When filled to her Plimsoll line, a Gulf tanker bore only half the load of a conventional ULCC, yet she displaced a third more water. A single glance at the
Maracaibo
's silhouette was sufficient to explain this disparity. Three Phalanx 20mm cannon sat atop her fo'c'sle; six Meroka 12-barrel guns jutted from her stern; fifty Westland Lynx Mk-15 depth charges clung to her bulwarks. Missile-wise, the
Maracaibo
achieved the elusive ideal of multiculturalism: Crotales from France, Aspides from Italy, Sea Darts from Britain, Homing Hawks from Israel. Since adding a dozen Persian Gulf tankers to her shipping fleet, Carpco's stock had risen eleven points.

"Steady," said Katsakos.

"Steady," echoed Neil.

It was damn hairy, this business of maneuvering at high speed through the bergs and floes of the Norwegian Sea. Despite his second-mate status, Katsakos did not seem like a particularly smart or experienced sailor (the day before, he'd led them six leagues off course before noticing his error), and Neil did not really trust him to guide the tanker safely. Neil's fervent wish was that the
Maracaibo's
captain himself would appear on the bridge and take over.

"Ten degrees left rudder."

"Ten left."

But the captain never appeared on the bridge—or anywhere else, for that matter. He was as aloof and inaccessible as the immaterial God whom Neil had failed to find during his self-imposed exile on Van Horne Island. At times he wondered whether the
Maracaibo
even had a master. For the first three days, Neil's penance had gone well. The sun had been suitably hot, his hunger appropriately painful, his thirst fittingly intense (he'd allowed himself no more than a pint of dew every four hours). Perched in his petrified fig tree like some crazed, outcast, spiritually famished vulture, Neil had struggled to gain the universe's attention. "You appeared to Moses! You appeared to Job!" he'd cried into the fog, over and over until his tongue became so dry the words stuck to it like burrs. "Now appear to me!"

Looking out to sea, Neil had been astonished to behold a Persian Gulf tanker, gravid with cargo and lying at anchor in the very cove from which the
Valparaíso
had recently departed. An hour later, a Falstaffian man with bad skin appeared at the base of his tree, swathed in the island's eternal mist.

"And who might
you
be?" demanded the intruder in a musical Italian accent. Terra-cotta sand clung to his vinyl cassock, muting the bright red silk.

"Able Seaman Weisinger of the United States Merchant Marine," he mumbled, certain he was about to faint.