“Why does God permit this?” asked Pembroke of no one in particular.
“Shoulders Gibraltar, shiny as a halter!” screamed Flume, writhing in agony. “Oh, Jesus, it hurts! It hurts so much!”
Everyone tried to be polite.
Everyone struggled to avoid the subject.
But in the end Albert Flume’s situation could not be denied, and right before Strawberry Eleven belly flopped into the Norwegian Sea, splitting into a dozen pieces, Pembroke turned to his best friend and said, in a soft, sad voice, “Alby, buddy, you don’t have any arms.”
FATHER
BY A MIRACLE OF the sort that in an earlier age Jehovah Himself might have wrought, the Valparaíso stayed afloat that afternoon, allowing the officers, crew, and rescued war reenactors to abandon her in an orderly fashion. There was even time to salvage certain crucial items: footlockers, musical instruments, fillets of Corpus Dei, a few jars of glory grease, some supervegetables from Follingsbee’s garden, the Ten Commandments print. The Valparaíso was terminal, of course. Anthony knew it. A captain could always tell. No ingenious patching job or heroic pumping effort could save her. But what a fighter, he thought, what a tough old lady, ceding fewer than ten feet per hour to the bloodstained Norwegian Sea. By noon her weather deck lay completely buried, but her superstructure was still visible, rising out of the waves like a hotel perched on pylons.
At 1420, Anthony began ferrying the final group over the red ocean to the Carpco Maracaibo — a grim little party consisting of Cassie, Rafferty, O’Connor, Father Ockham, and Sister Miriam, each evacuee clutching a seabag. No one said a word. Cassie refused to look him in the eye. She had much to brood about, he knew, several reasons to be sad: the failure of her plot, the crash landing of her boyfriend’s plane, the deaths of John Waldron and two other mercenaries. Were Anthony not himself benumbed and despondent, he might have actually felt sorry for her.
He parked the Juan Fernandez beside a vulcanized rubber dock tied to the Maracaibo’ s hull, waited until everyone had disembarked, then cast off.
“Where’re you going?” Rafferty called after him.
“I forgot my sextant.”
“Christ, Anthony — I’ll buy you a sextant in New York!”
“My sister gave it to me!” he shouted toward the fading figures on the dock.
By 1445 Anthony was back at the wreck site, maneuvering the Juan Fernandez alongside a first-floor window. He smashed the glass with the launch’s stockless anchor and climbed over the sill. The elevator had shorted out, so he used the companionways instead. Reaching level seven, he entered the chart room, locked the door, and waited.
Brain lost.
Body lost.
Val lost.
There was no choice, really. He’d blown the mission. His second chance was gone.
He stared at the Formica table. The jumbled maps tormented him. Sulawesi, redolent of Cassie’s midriff. Pago Pago, so evocative of her breasts. He lifted his gaze. Forward wall, the Mediterranean; aft wall, the Indian Ocean; port wall, the South Pacific; starboard wall, the North Atlantic. He was giving up so much, all these glorious tracts of sea and patches of shore, most of them despoiled and ravaged by the reigning species, yet all still painfully beautiful at the core. Let no man say Anthony Van Horne did not know what he was losing.
His migraine awoke. In a corner of the aura, an oiled egret rose from the chart of Matagorda Bay and flapped its matted wings. Seconds later, a pilot whale, glossy with Texas crude, wriggled out of the same poisoned sea, flopped onto the floor, and died. How would the end come? Would the ocean pour into the chart room and drown him? Or was the door sufficiently watertight that he would survive the descent into the Mohns Trench, only to perish when the impossible pressures hit the superstructure, crushing it like an egg under a jackboot?
A loud knock. Then four, rat-a-tat-tat. Anthony ignored them. His visitor persisted.
“Yeah?”
“It’s Thomas. Open up.”
“Get away!”
“Suicide’s a sin, Anthony.”
“In whose eyes? His? They went to jelly two weeks ago.”
At least one of the losing admirals at Midway, he recalled, had done the honorable thing. Anthony hungered for the details. Had the poor defeated Jap chained himself to the helm? Had he changed his mind at the last minute but died anyway because nobody was around to unlock the manacle?
A new voice now. “Anthony, open the door. Something unbelievable has happened.”
“Cassie, get out! You’re on a sinking ship!”
“I just talked to the Maracaibo’s second mate, and he says her skipper is named Christopher Van Horne.”
Anthony’s migraine flared hotter than ever. “Get out!”
“Christopher Van Horne,” she said again. “Your father!”
“My father’s in Spain.”
“Your father’s a thousand yards to port. Open the door.”
A dark laugh rose from the depths of Anthony’s chest. Him? Dear old Dad? But of course, naturally, who else would the Vatican have picked to hunt down the Val and steal her cargo? He wondered how they’d lured him out of retirement. Money, most likely. (Columbus had been greedy too.) Or had the old man been seduced by the opportunity to humiliate his son once again?
“He wants to see you, Katsakos says.” Cassie sounded on the verge of tears.
“He wants to steal my cargo.”
“He’s in no shape to steal anything,” Ockham insisted. “He was out in the open when that bomb hit the Maracaibo.”
“He’s hurt?”
“Sounds pretty bad.”
“Is he assuming I’ll come?”
“He’s assuming you’ll go down with your ship,” said the priest. “ ‘The Van Hornes go down with their ships,’ he told Katsakos.”
“Then I mustn’t disappoint him.”
“Guess he knows you pretty well.”
“He doesn’t know me at all. Get back to the Maracaibo, both of you.”
“He tried to save the Val,” Cassie protested.
“I doubt that,” said Anthony.
“Open the door. Why do you think he cut your chains?”
“To take my cargo away.”
“To stop the torpedo strike. Why do you think he fired on the planes?”
“So they wouldn’t sink our cargo.”
“So they wouldn’t sink you. Ask Katsakos. Open the door.”
Anthony fixed on the starboard wall. He imagined God massaging the primordial continent, cleaving South America from Africa; he saw the new ocean, the Atlantic, pouring into the breach like amniotic fluid spilling from a ruptured birth sac. Was Cassie telling the truth? Had the old man’s Midway tactics really been intended to save the Val?
“I lost God.”
“Merely for the moment,” said Ockham. “You’ll finish this job yet.”
“Your father loves you,” said Cassie. “So do I, for that matter. Open the door.”
“The Val’s doomed,” said Anthony.
“Then you’ll have to hitch Him to the Maracaibo, won’t you?” said Ockham.
“The Maracaibo’s not mine.”
“That needn’t stop you.”
Anthony opened the door.
And there she stood, eyes moist and sunken, lips chapped, a band of frost spread across her brow like a diamond tiara. Lord, what a perfect match they were: two strong-willed people preoccupied with seven million tons of carrion, though for very different reasons.
“You love me, Cassie?”
“Against my better judgment.”