The ship went down screaming, a chorus of bending steel and dying creatures. I had to make for a launch and hope not to be shot. I was lucky. Someone got a polehook into my jacket and landed us like fish. I lay on the deck, water running out of my clothes, swallowing as much air as I could breathe.
I heard Franklin yelling. His lungs were still in working order.
Someone big in a voluminous slicker, a sou’wester tied to his head, knelt by me, and slapped me in the face.
“Peeper,” he said.
“They’re calling it the Great Los Angeles Air Raid,” Winthrop told me as he poured a mug of British tea. “Some time last night a panic started, and everyone in Bay City shot at the sky for hours.”
“The Japs?” I said, taking a mouthful of welcome hot liquid.
“In theory. Actually, I doubt it. It’ll be recorded as a fiasco, a lot of jumpy characters with guns. While it was all going on, we engaged the enemy and emerged victorious.”
He was still dressed up for an embassy ball and didn’t look as if he’d been on deck all evening. Geneviève Dieudonné wore a fisherman’s sweater and fatigue pants, her hair up in a scarf. She was looking at a lot of sounding equipment and noting down readings.
“You’re not fighting the Japs, are you?”
Winthrop pursed his lips. “An older war, my friend. We can’t be distracted. After last night’s action, our Deep Ones won’t poke their scaly noses out for a while. Now I can do something to lick Hitler.”
“What really happened?”
“There was something dangerous in the sea, under Mr. Brunette’s boat. We have destroyed it and routed the … uh, the hostile forces. They wanted the boat as a surface station. That’s why Mr. Brunette’s associates were eliminated.”
Geneviève gave a report in French, so fast that I couldn’t follow.
“Total destruction,” Winthrop explained, “a dreadful set-back for them. It’ll put them in their place for years. Forever would be too much to hope for, but a few years will help.”
I lay back on the bunk, feeling my wounds. Already choking on phlegm, I would be lucky to escape pneumonia.
“And the little fellow is a decided dividend.”
Finlay glumly poked around, suggesting another dose of depth charges. He was cradling a mercifully sleep-struck Franklin, but didn’t look terribly maternal.
“He seems quite unaffected by it all.”
“His name is Franklin,” I told Winthrop. “On the boat, he was…”
“Not himself? I’m familiar with the condition. It’s a filthy business, you understand.”
“He’ll be all right,” Geneviève put in.
I wasn’t sure whether the rest of the slicker crew were feds or servicemen and I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to know. I could tell a Clandestine Operation when I landed in the middle of one.
“Who knows about this?” I asked. “Hoover? Roosevelt?”
Winthrop didn’t answer.
“Someone must know,” I said.
“Yes,” the Englishman said, “someone must. But this is a war the public would never believe exists. In the Bureau, Finlay’s outfit are known as ‘the Unnameables’, never mentioned by the press, never honoured or censured by the government, victories and defeats never recorded in the official history.”
The launch shifted with the waves, and I hugged myself, hoping for some warmth to creep over me. Finlay had promised to break out a bottle later but that made me resolve to stick to tea as a point of honour. I hated to fulfil his expectations.
“And America is a young country,” Winthrop explained. “In Europe, we’ve known things a lot longer.”
On shore, I’d have to tell Janey Wilde about Brunette and hand over Franklin. Some flack at Metro would be thinking of an excuse for the Panther Princess’s disappearance. Everything else—the depth charges, the sea battle, the sinking ship—would be swallowed up by the War.
All that would be left would be tales. Weird tales.
•
Rapture of the Deep
Cody Goodfellow
The old man tried to walk on his own as they lifted him off the chopper. They let him fall on his face, then lifted him off the helipad deck by his handcuffed wrists and drove him up the catwalk.
His mangled nose spewed blood over his mustachioed mouth, glazed eyes rolled back in his bald, heavily sedated head, but the image he sent her almost blinded her with its intensity. She shivered as the brilliant sunny day and the endless ocean vanished behind a wave of frigid white mind-noise.
Cold.
White cold. Snow flurries. Cold white and hot red splashing from his frostbitten hand, as he tries to get his black severed fingers from the wolves that haunt the perimeter of the gulag. The laughing guards, the long red wolf-tongues panting behind clouds of breath-mist…
And then… blackness. Total and crushing darkness. Buried alive under five miles of bone-chilling cold, sunless ocean.
She gagged on the flood of phantom sensation and clung to the railing as they carried him out of sight.
The message was clear. Their cruelty was amateurish, next to that of his old masters. An unaccustomed treat they would gorge themselves on until it made them sick.
He told her even more by assaulting her so, even as they led him down below the waterline, to the interrogation cells. He was more powerful than even his old Soviet handlers had known… but maybe he could only do it when they hurt him.
Beside her, Roger Mankiw shook the crushed ice in his mojito and turned to look at her through green lenses. “You’re afraid of him, Ingrid?”
Not half as afraid of him as you should be of me, she thought back, and he might have tasted the sting of it, even he, her skeptical boss. His reedy neck straightened. The sweat rings on his linen shirt deepened. “He’s capable, but he’s a coward,” she told him. “He’s afraid of something he saw down there.”
“He led us a merry chase, you know. Two contractors topped, untold collateral damage over there. Thailand’s off-limits, now. Our legal eagles are triple-billing us for—”
“Three.”
“Pardon?”
“A contractor jumped out of the chopper, a half hour out. Pulled his grenade pins and jumped. Sergei touched him, they say. Just once.”
He didn’t ask her how she knew. “Christ!” He tossed his drink over the side. The glass shattered on the lower railings of the research ship and dimpled the heaving sea. Some lucky fish got the bits of mint and ice. Some luckier fish in the indigo deeps far below would get the ones who ate the glass.
“I never signed on for any of this One Step Beyond shit,” Mankiw growled. “The data shows a steady warming trend with trace radioactivity that’s sweeping the whole South Pacific starting right here, but I’d just as soon keep tossing five million-dollar drone submersibles into the breach, until the head office wises up and drops this entire idiotic venture.”
Easy for him to say. He was vested, and would fail up the ladder to a corner office in Hong Kong. She would sink like a stone. “Roger, pressing with that kind of urgency sends the wrong message. Sergei will read it as weakness—”
“Then show none. If you don’t get anything out of him now, I for one will go to the mat for you. But if he doesn’t produce immediately, no more games. No more threats. One way or the other, he’s going to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Today.”
* * *
She waited until he was lucid and beginning to show visible discomfort before she entered his cell. “Perhaps now, Sergei Vasilievich, you will take us a bit more seriously.”