Taking his mirrorshades from the pocket of his parka, Anthony slipped them on and, turning, confronted Ockham with a dual reflection of his captain. “You really think we can resume the tow?”
“I’ve seen you pull bigger rabbits out of smaller hats,” said the priest.
“Okay, but first I’m goin’ to my cabin. I need some things. A Popeye the Sailor notebook…”
Ockham cringed. “Captain, the Val’s about to break apart.”
“A brass sextant,” said Anthony. “A bottle of burgundy.”
“Be quick about it.”
“The feather of an angel.”
“I can certainly see the resemblance,” said the agitated young man with the frozen stethoscope slung around his neck and the aluminum clipboard snugged against his chest. “The high forehead, the heavy jaw — you’re definitely your father’s son.”
“And my mother’s…” Anthony climbed past a rack of empty Crotale missile launchers and stepped onto the Maracaibo’s athwartships catwalk.
“Giuseppe Carminati,” said the physician. His ensemble included an officer’s cap with a red cross stitched above the brim and a ceremonial overcoat sporting gold buttons and epaulets, as if he’d just come from appearing in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta about shipboard surgeons. “Your father’s alive, but he can’t be moved. Our quartermaster’s attending him over by number three ballast tank. I believe you know the man. We picked him up in the Gibraltar Sea.”
“Neil Weisinger?” asked Ockham eagerly.
Wrapping his glove around the frosty bulb of his stethoscope, Carminati turned toward the priest. “Correct. Weisinger.” The physician smiled with the left side of his mouth. “Perhaps you remember me?”
“We’ve met?”
“Three months ago, in the Vatican screening room — I was Gabriel’s attending physician.” Carminati hugged himself. “I should be in Rome right now, listening to the Holy Father’s heart. I don’t function well in the cold.”
“You got many casualties?” asked Anthony.
“Compared with the original Midway, no. Twenty-one cases of acute hypothermia, most of them complicated by lacerations and broken bones, plus a noncombatant observer who got badly burned when his PBY caught fire.”
“Oliver Shostak?” asked Cassie in a fearful, repentant voice.
“Albert Flume,” said Carminati, consulting his clipboard. “Shostak, it seems, has a dislocated shoulder. You know him?”
“An old boyfriend. Dislocated shoulder, that’s all?”
“Superficial cuts, minor burns, treatable hypothermia.”
“And some people say there’s no God,” muttered Anthony.
“Expect to lose anyone?” asked Ockham.
“No, though the actor portraying Lieutenant Commander John Waldron, a man named” — Carminati glanced at the list — “Brad Keating, was vaporized when a missile hit his torpedo plane. Ditto his gunner, Carny Otis in the role of Ensign Collins. Forty minutes ago we pulled a corpse from the sea: David Pasquali as Ensign George Gay. But for the fact that he’ll be dead soon, Captain, your father would probably be facing a manslaughter indictment.”
“Dead?” Anthony steadied himself on the Crotale rack. No, God, please, the bastard couldn’t be checking out yet, not before shriving his son.
“Forgive my bluntness,” said Carminati. “It’s been a bad morning. I can promise you he’s in no pain. The Maracaibo carries more morphine than bunker fuel.”
“Anthony… I’m so sorry,” said Cassie. “These people Oliver hired, they’re obviously deranged. I never imagined…” The words froze in her throat.
The captain faced the bow, shouldered his knapsack, and marched down the Maracaibo’s central catwalk, passing over a vast tangle of valves and pipework spreading in all directions like exposed entrails. Reaching the fo’c’sle, he picked his way through the aftermath of the demolition bomb — buckled hatches, smashed bulwarks, melted Phalanx cannon — and, descending the ladder, started toward number three ballast tank.
Ever since the butane had gone into the gravy, Anthony had wondered exactly how he would behave when his father finally left the world. Would he snicker through the viewing? Pass out balloons at the funeral? Leave a lunger on the grave? He needn’t have worried. The instant he beheld Christopher Van Horne’s trapped and broken form, a flood of spontaneous pity poured through him.
Evidently the shock wave had lifted the old man from behind the Phalanx, flung him off the fo’c’sle, and dropped him beside the tank. There he lay, parka shredded, eyes closed, body imprisoned by an errant Hoffritz valve assembly, its ten-foot-long stem driven clear through the Butterworth plate, its huge circular handle — larger than a covered-wagon wheel — pressed tightly against his chest, pinning him to the starboard samson post in a dreadful parody of sitting. Fire had ravaged the sides of his face, exposing his beautiful cheekbones. His left leg, grotesquely bent, might have belonged to a castoff marionette, a puppet whose master had died for reasons not even the angels knew.
Neil Weisinger stood atop the plate, teeth chattering as he transferred fresh water from an insulated gallon jug to a cylindrical white Thermos bottle advertising Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, “Good afternoon, sir,” said the AB, saluting. “We got a team of licensed welders under the deck right now, cutting the stem loose.”
“You’re a two-time deserter, Weisinger.” Anthony shed his knapsack.
“Not exactly, sir,” said the AB, capping the bottle. A corrugated straw elbowed out of the lid. “I didn’t break out of the brig — Joe Spicer kidnapped me.”
“If somebody’s a deserter,” mumbled Christopher Van Horne, “he should be hauled off…”
Unzipping the knapsack, Anthony removed a liter of burgundy and gestured for the Last Crusade bottle.
“…hauled off and shot.”
Anthony dumped out the water and, in a small-scale recapitulation of the pump-room boys ballasting the Val with blood, filled the bottle to the brim. Kneeling, he placed one glove on the valve, the other on his father’s shoulder. “Hello, Dad,” he whispered.
“Son?” The old man’s eyes flickered open. “That you? You came?”
“It’s me. Hope you’re not in pain.”
“Wish I was.”
“Oh?”
“I knew this guy once, a demac on the Amoco Cadiz, dying of bone cancer. You know what he said? ‘When they give you morphine like there’s no tomorrow, there isn’t.’ ” An oddly seraphic grin spread across Christopher Van Horne’s ashen face. “Tell Tiffany I love her. Got that? Old Froggy loves her.”
“I’ll tell her.”
“You think she’s a bimbo, don’t you?”
“No, no.” Like a firing-squad captain providing his prisoner with a last cigarette, Anthony pushed the corrugated straw between his father’s lips. “Have some wine.”
The old man sipped. “Good stuff.”
“The best.”
“No more beard, huh?”
“No more beard.”
“You didn’t go down with your ship.” His tone was more curious than accusing.
“I’ve found the woman I want to marry. You’d like her.”
“I really stuck it to those squadrons, didn’t I?”
“She’s got Mom’s energy, Susan’s spunk.”
“Smeared ’em all over the sky.”
Anthony withdrew the straw. “Something else you should know. That uncharted island in the Gibraltar Sea — I named it after you. Van Horne Island.”
“Gave every damn Dauntless hell. More wine, okay?”
“Van Horne Island,” said Anthony again, reinserting the straw. “You’ve finally got your own private paradise. Understand?”