The Darwin Strain Read online

  Dedication

  For Donald Peterson—whose principles of kindness are the hope of our species

  Epigraph

  Socially inept, I was—like most of my friends, driven mostly by a child-like sense of wonder about the world. We were beat over the heads for our strange ideas—told that the answers we sought from nature were impossibilities . . . that we must put away childish thoughts, and curiosity, and “grow up.” Some of us resisted. We never did finish growing up. But we never stopped growing.

  —Sir Arthur C. Clarke

  It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.

  —Walt Disney

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map #1

  Map #2

  Map #3

  Map #4

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: Hephaestus Awakes

  Chapter 2: From the Graves of Eden

  Chapter 3: Adaptation

  Chapter 4: Dead of Night

  Chapter 5: Plum Island Rising

  Chapter 6: It Came from Beneath the Sea

  Chapter 7: Lysenko

  Chapter 8: All That Remains

  Chapter 9: Seeing Red

  Chapter 10: A Meeting with Medusa

  Chapter 11: Secret Wars

  Chapter 12: Codes and Conspiracies

  Chapter 13: What an Octopus Knows

  Chapter 14: Immortal Sins

  Chapter 15: Beyond the Spectrum

  Chapter 16: A Study in Scarlet

  Chapter 17: Future Primitive

  Chapter 18: Chains of Command

  Chapter 19: Icarus

  Chapter 20: Anger, Denial, Acceptance

  Epilogue Part 1: Yanni: The Quest

  Part 2: The Darwin Strain: Anatomy of a Legend

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Authors

  Also by Bill Schutt & J. R. Finch

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Map #1

  Map #2

  Map #3

  Map #4

  Prologue

  June 23, 1948

  U.S. Surveillance Ship Argo, Eastern Mediterranean

  120 miles south of Santorini, Greece

  The Devil’s Hole was a gash so deeply cut into the seafloor that generations of Greek fishermen simply considered it to be bottomless. The young technology officer at the controls of his ship’s experimental sonar array knew otherwise. With the highest resolution of its kind, his equipment revealed a rim of ledges and hills nearly eleven thousand feet beneath the surface, with the hole itself descending some four thousand feet below that. These findings were fascinating, but he knew they were utterly classified. Only a select few were permitted to know that such an instrument even existed.

  As with most great discoveries, those who first glimpsed the lost world had started out looking for something else. During an earlier practice run for a planned deployment in the Atlantic, the new sonar system had easily revealed the locations and dimensions of Allied submarines, ordered to run silent at various depths as part of the test. An unexpected benefit was that the device also peered beyond its targets and into the seabed itself, revealing details that had, until then, been completely hidden from human eyes.

  The sonar technicians aboard the Argo had already named the largest of the riverine features east of the Devil’s Hole, Lethe and Styx. But beyond their references to the ancient Greek underworld, no one really believed rivers had ever flowed along the seabed. “Not really,” they all agreed. Until they didn’t—until it became difficult to agree on the meaning of anything they were observing.

  Near the western foothills of a seamount overlooking Styx, a series of perfectly circular shapes in the seafloor should have been easy to dismiss as natural formations that by sheer coincidence merely resembled unnatural figures. But unlike Germany’s Ries Basin and the Great Hudson Bay, these circles seemed too perfect. And then there were the straight lines crossing tangentially and radiating away from the circles, like ancient canals or roads, created on a cyclopean scale and with mathematical precision. The sonar men knew from experience that nature seemed to abhor perfectly straight lines scratched into the earth, perhaps even more than it abhorred perfect circles. Yet there they were, both shapes together.

  Ultimately, the engineers agreed that until someone built a submarine capable of descending two miles and with the ability to collect samples, nothing more could be said beyond the fact that the peculiar geometry appeared to resemble an unnatural phenomenon.

  Nonetheless, in private thoughts and hushed conversations, no one aboard the Argo could make even a reasonable guess at who could have built such a thing at that depth.

  Chapter 1

  Hephaestus Awakes

  The first thing that must be asked about future man is whether he will be alive, and will know how to keep alive, and not whether it is a good thing that he should be alive.

  —Charles Darwin

  We tend to think of ourselves as the only wholly unique creations in nature, but this is not so. Uniqueness is so commonplace a property of living things that there is really nothing at all unique about it.

  —Lewis Thomas

  June 23, 1948

  The Greek Isle of Santorini, Eastern Mediterranean

  Jacques Yves Cousteau had never been seasick in his life but something told him that this was probably what it felt like.

  “Merde alors,” he muttered, walking unsteadily away from the twin-engine light transport.

  The French Air Force was grooming the ten-passenger Dassault “Flamingo,” including its newly modified glazed nose, for use as a trainer and light bomber. Cousteau, a thirty-eight-year-old former naval officer, had called in a favor to be flown from Tunisia to an airstrip on the Greek island of Santorini, as quickly as possible.

  He turned back to see two of the ground crew hauling his baggage out of the cargo hold. One tall Greek was lugging an oversize canvas bag that contained his clothes and wet suit, while the other struggled with a pair of steel air tanks.

  Cousteau called a warning to the one wrestling with the cylinders. “Monsieur, soyez prudent avec ceux.”

  The man gave him a quick disinterested wave, before muttering something to his coworker. Cousteau ignored him, turning his attention instead to the pilot, who had already climbed outside to inspect one of the plane’s duel six-cylinder engines.

  A bit underpowered, isn’t she? Cousteau thought.

  Lieutenant Cousteau knew that if not for a horrific accident a decade earlier, he should have been the one piloting the plane, perhaps even flight-testing one of the newer models. His dreams of becoming a naval aviator had been derailed in a single moment of random chance—a car crash that broke both of his arms. Even now, Cousteau cringed at the memory, cognizant that few people knew how very close he had come to dying. The young gunnery officer had nonetheless adapted quickly, steering a new path during the remainder of the war, toward his lifelong fascination with the sea and diving. Working with the French Resistance, he had also found time to codevelop the regulator apparatus that made Jules Verne’s Aqua-Lung a reality.

  On land, “Gravity is my enemy,” he sometimes told friends. The damage to Cousteau’s bones made him feel like a man at least thirty years older—yet beneath the water, I am free, like a child.

  These days, in an alliance with the American navy, his government was assigning him to form what someone had already christened the Underwater Studies and Research Group. Cousteau and his small team were field-testing improvements on thei
r equipment while simultaneously exploring and mapping the remains of a Roman shipwreck—the first such scuba expedition in history. The project was not yet complete when two members of his team were called away from the Tunisia wreck site and flown to Santorini with instructions to investigate the aftermath of seismic shifts offshore. Reportedly the quakes were associated with “some interesting biological phenomena.” Cousteau, still recovering from a serious infection he’d contracted in Tunisia, had planned to sit this one out. Now, though, a message from his called-away friend Vincent had changed the plan.

  From the air, it had been easy to see that Santorini was the outer rim of a caldera nearly eight miles wide, the remains of an ancient cataclysm that had literally blown a hole in the earth. Long before the first words were written or even spoken in Greek, the northern Mediterranean filled in the wound, creating one of the planet’s most picturesque lagoons. But beauty could not hide the violence or the potential for it to awaken again. Near the center of the lagoon, the isle of Nea Kameni (“the new burnt land”) had risen in smoke and flames during the time of Napoleon. More recently there had occurred a series of small but progressively stronger quakes, and although geologists debated whether these might be ushering in a new period of island building, they all agreed on one thing—Santorini was not dead.

  But volcanic islands awakening do not normally attract the attention of both the French Navy and the Greek Orthodox Church, Cousteau told himself, shaking his head at the incongruity.

  Twenty minutes after landing, he checked into what his driver described as “the only hotel in town.” The clerk—his eyes conveying the expression of a man who had perhaps seen too much during the war—passed Cousteau a sealed envelope. The Frenchman shot him a questioning look but the man simply shrugged.

  The message inside was in neat, handwritten English.

  “Heard you were dropping by. Have made remarkable discovery in local quarry. Your old friend MacCready should be here soon. Hope we can compare notes (and share Mac stories) tonight over a bottle of grappa. —Cordially, Wang Tse-lin”

  Cousteau smiled. At the bottom of the sheet, the Chinese scientist had written a phone number and the local address for a restaurant, in what was apparently another “only hotel in town.”

  Tse-lin was a paleo-anthropologist with a brontosaurian appetite for all of the sciences—including zoology and gemology. During the war, he had lived through the darkest, most tenuous days of the resistance against the occupation of northern China by the late empire of Japan. Recently he had also survived some undisclosed adventure with R. J. MacCready, apparently settling now into what the Frenchman considered to be a rather tame existence collecting fossils and gems. Evidently the only mission Tse-lin cared about these days involved the peace and quiet of fossil-studded cliffs offering skyscraper-high views of the Aegean Sea.

  A good plan, Cousteau told himself. Until it wasn’t.

  The Frenchman was looking forward to a meeting with the newest member of the MacCready gang—but that would have to wait. As if to drive home this particular point, he turned toward a commotion at the front door. It was Vincent, trailed by Laurent. Their excitement was unmistakable, and urgent.

  “Jacques, finally!” Vincent exclaimed, rushing in to hug him.

  “Are you ready to dive?” Laurent chimed in.

  Cousteau gestured to his bags and equipment, which had been deposited beside the hotel’s front desk. “Yes, I am ready this very minute,” Cousteau responded. “No food. No rest. Still sick. A dive sounds like great fun.”

  “Great!” they exclaimed in unison. Cousteau nodded, reminded that sarcasm had never been one of his strong skills.

  The clerk had apparently moved past any concerns about the odd luggage and was now looking quite amused at what was unfolding. Shooting the man a suspicious look, Vincent gestured for Cousteau to come nearer, then began whispering something in his ear. During the next minute, the newly arrived Frenchman became even more animated than his two friends. Five minutes after that, the hotel worker was staring at Cousteau’s open canvas bag—which looked as if it had just ejected a small assortment of clothing onto the floor. The strange guest and half of the even stranger tanks that had arrived with him were gone.

  “Cela semble microbien,” one of the Frenchmen called out, over the protests of an aging inboard engine. His two compatriots nodded in response.

  As the little fishing boat motored away from the waterfront village of Fira, its owner, Antoninus Stavracos, thought it odd that the newest member of the trio was ignoring the spectacular multicolored cliffs bordering a crater lagoon nearly three times wider than New York City.

  “Une espèce de Rhodophyte, peut-être?” a second Frenchman called out. He and his friend had hired Stavracos to take them on an identical dive trip several days earlier.

  “Je ne pense pas,” the new man responded, with a head shake. Though the Greek boatman could barely track more than a few phrases of French at a time, it was clear that this one was the leader.

  They’re talking about the arrival of the red waters, Stavracos thought. His Holy Blood. The Greek found it impossible not to fixate on the amazing events that had occurred during the two months since “the Reddening”: The fish in the markets are larger and healthier, and those who eat them have been cured from all manner of ailments. “A miracle,” Stavracos said, beneath the sound of the motor. Then, shooting a quick glance skyward, he crossed himself.

  He knew that, unlike these Frenchmen, most of his recent clientele had been locals—parents mostly, accompanied by their sick or crippled children. He’d taken them to the exact spot where his Holy Blood poured from wounds on the seafloor. Stigmata, some were calling the red plumes, though no one, save for these Frenchmen, had dared to investigate any deeper.

  Nearly all of the pilgrims who hired out his boat were poor, like he was, and although he felt bad about taking advantage of their misfortune, he sometimes took a few coins or an item that had been bartered. Often, though, and this was something Stavracos kept from his wife, he charged them nothing at all—the sight of mothers and fathers gently lowering their loved ones into the red water was incompatible with the collection of a fee. He shook his head, remembering how some poor souls, too weak for even a brief immersion, had been splashed with the red-tinted water.

  Using the relative positions of the three islands that surrounded them, Therasia looming ahead, Nea Kameni port side, and the cliffs of Santorini far to the rear, Stavracos throttled back briefly before turning off the engine. Satisfied that he’d pinpointed the desired location, he gestured toward the anchor, but none of the men took notice. They were either struggling into black rubber dive suits or adjusting the equipment and bulky air tanks that would allow them to remain submerged for nearly half an hour.

  Shaking his head, Antoninus Stavracos moved forward and lowered the anchor himself, feeling for and finding the bottom. He allowed himself a smile, pleased that he could now pinpoint the initial section of shallows, bordering a drop-off estimated to reach at least a third of a mile.

  Several minutes later, the boat owner’s concerns about the divers and their questionable motives were interrupted by a rapid series of splashes as one by one the men tumbled backward over the gunwale and disappeared.

  He watched three sets of bubbles rise through the dark water. God prevent these strangers from desecrating this site, he thought. Then Antoninus Stavracos crossed himself yet again.

  As Cousteau followed Vincent and Laurent toward a gentle slope strewn with rocks, he managed a quick review of all that he had recently learned. Two months earlier, there had occurred a small earthquake. There were no fatalities and little damage beyond some cracked masonry and smashed glassware. In the aftermath, though, the waters near the lagoon’s central cluster of islands gradually began to change color, and within a day or two a sharp-eyed fisherman had determined the source—a shallow spot near the shore of Nea Kameni. Here the stained waters were indeed flowing toward the surface, warm a
nd red—like blood. Soon after came the first claims of rejuvenation and healing, with local doctors perplexed at their apparent validity. About a week after that, the Greek Orthodox Church got into the act and several elder representatives arrived from Crete to begin an investigation.

  “They’re calling it a Greek version of Lourdes and Fatima,” Vincent had explained with a shrug.

  “At first we thought it was just superstitious nonsense,” Laurent had added.

  But the mystery only deepened after one of the town physicians discovered that the so-called miracle fish all contained a strange red material in their guts, at which point Cousteau was alerted. By the time he arrived, his men discovered the source of the material—a series of vents on the seafloor, sixty feet below the surface.

  As Cousteau equalized the pressure in his ears and descended toward a rocky incline, he could see it for himself—strange, cauliflower-like billows of red smoke escaping fissures no wider than his fist. Heard above the distant propeller whine of a fishing boat were the sounds emanating from the vents themselves—a steady rumble of water, accented by the occasional clicking and snapping of rocks trapped within.

  Pulling up beside Cousteau as they reached the bottom, Vincent pointed to a boulder several yards from the nearest vent. Like much of the surrounding hillside, it had the appearance of being covered in lush scarlet-hued velvet, and as they moved nearer, Cousteau could feel a significant rise in water temperature. Knowing that his men had taken only a tiny sample of the material on their first dive, he could also see that someone—in all likelihood a free diver—had been there as well, apparently using a blade to scrape away sections of the red mat. Whoever did this had exposed a series of organic strata, the outermost of which were clearly alive. The curious formation reminded Cousteau of the fossilized algal mats called stromatolites, whose modern descendants thrived in the most saline water on the planet.