The Darwin Strain Read online

  “That may not be far off the mark. It seems something major has happened back home. Some sort of spy-ring roundup. Whether or not we keep any captured Russians may depend on which of our people are still alive on that island in the morning.”

  “And if Nesbitt sends out a call to bomb her?”

  “I’m certain MacArthur would want her, and those near her, dead,” Christian replied. “But I’m just as certain that she has zero knowledge about us having these two pilots—and, from the sound of it, a serious collection of other Russian prisoners back home, valuable enough for an exchange.”

  “But if she calls, do we send in the Hellcats?”

  The captain looked toward the distant fires, watched for a few seconds, and shrugged. “I guess we’ll just have to see.”

  July 10, 1948

  10:12 p.m., Seven Minutes after Moment Zero

  Two Miles North of Santorini

  Aboard the Kursk

  From this perspective, the sheer cliffs rimming the lagoon blocked Trofim Lysenko’s view of the downslope toward Akrotiri, nearly ten miles away. The only information that came through was a short breach of radio silence—with a very businesslike voice announcing an attack, followed by reflections in the sky of flashes on the ground.

  The single Kraken in the Kursk’s tank sounded suddenly like a whole nest of rattlesnakes, but the scientist knew better than to try silencing it with a spear or a pike—and besides, he needed to bring the animal home alive (along with a yet-to-be-obtained sample of the living moctus proctus).

  Lysenko joined his captain on the bridge and paced with aggravated impatience, awaiting news from the captured MacCready compound, trying to decide if they should plot a course to a landing position near Akrotiri. But that would place them on the far side of Santorini, almost within shouting distance of the American aircraft carrier.

  No, that will not serve us, Lysenko told himself. Our mission is to capture the red miracle and anything associated with it.

  “Orders?” the captain asked.

  “Take us ahead slow, one mile. Then into the lagoon.”

  The captain passed the order down, along with an order of his own: an open hatch on the forecastle needed to be closed, because it was leaking red light from below and he wanted the way ahead to be completely black, to avoid missing even the faintest bioluminescent flash from a Kraken.

  The path was clear.

  Even light from the town of Fira, high above the forward port side, provided no more distracting glimmers than a cluster of stars. Fortunately, most of the town did not even have electricity.

  Two small tankers now joined the Kursk and its support ships. Their holds had been topped off with poisons ranging from ordinary detergent to powdered aluminum and sodium hydroxide.

  Lysenko squinted into the darkness, his eyes sweeping slowly. The surface of the lagoon was dead calm, the water black as oil, except for reflected stars. The reflections winked and shimmered in summer’s thick humid air, but there was not a hint of bioluminescent commotion. Even the Kursk’s cephalopod captive seemed to be deciding on a strategy of silent running. Abruptly it had stopped sending forth clicks and rattles through the hull.

  The expedition leader sensed instinctively, but could not know for sure, that several of the beasts were already attaching themselves, noiselessly, to the ship’s hull.

  His intuition was correct. The Kraken were suction-grappling and climbing the steel cliff of the starboard side, seeking ingress. A porthole’s glass cracked under the pressure of suckers and barbs, and at the sound of it the creatures froze, blending even more skillfully into their immediate surroundings. A sentry dog whimpered inquisitively and padded over toward one side of the deck.

  Trofim Lysenko was already on the wing bridge, making another careful circuit with his eyes and his ears. Nothing. He made another circuit, and another. Still uneasy, he leaned over the starboard rail. Five Kraken were directly in his field of vision, no more than sixty feet away. He did not notice them.

  “You!” he called down to one of the dog handlers. “See anything? Hear anything?”

  “No. But I think the dogs smell something.”

  Stronger than German shepherds, the Kursk’s canine sentries were Russian black terriers, each with a sense of smell many hundreds of times more sensitive than a man’s. Two more of them went to the edge of the starboard side, whining. One opened its mouth to bark a warning when tendrils and sharpened copper whirled into his face, tongue, and throat—instantly cutting the bark down to a strangled moan.

  The infiltrators were not fast enough for the next dog. It lunged and howled and bit deeply before it died.

  Lysenko ran onto the bridge, hit the alarm, and in almost the same motion swung a floodlamp down at the blurry commotion below. Still within that same surge of motion, he was on the mike to the nearest tanker and breaking radio silence. “Soap-bomb it—now!”

  The tanker, only ninety feet away, responded before the Kraken had time to move. It struck them squarely, as three additional sentry dogs came galloping in for the attack. The hoses from the support ship were capable of dousing all of them at up to seven hundred pounds per square inch. The detergent cocktail was immediately debilitating and even suffocating to octopuses and their kin, but relatively harmless to humans and dogs.

  The Kraken fled over the side with a series of wails unlike anything Lysenko had heard before, or imagined he would ever hear. This did not stop him, or even give him pause. He pointed a search beam into the water and saw them trying to camouflage themselves, trying to escape, but their skin was now bleached pinkish-white and peeling apart, and they moved as if blinded.

  The scientist was on the mike again. “Give them the aluminum bath!”

  Two more hoses came to life—one jetting sodium hydroxide, the other delivering a slurry of aluminum silt. The two substances penetrated the sea surface and the wounded cephalopods, combining to make the water and the flesh of the Kraken erupt explosively, using only a simple chemistry found in an American cleaning agent called Drano.

  By this time, at least a half-dozen Kraken were swimming up from below. Uninjured, they entered the toxic brew, clearly trying to pull their burned and dying brethren away from the danger.

  “Give them another shot!” Lysenko commanded. “And do not go sparingly on the poison.” He did not know that essentially anyone who had been acquainted with him for more than a few months, and who heard this call, had the very same thought but dare not speak it.

  Do not go sparingly on the poison, he had said. And Trofim Lysenko would never learn how many of those around him, including the captain, wished his mother had embraced that philosophy.

  July 10, 1948

  10:15 p.m., Ten Minutes after Moment Zero

  Captured MacCready Base Camp #3

  Santorini

  Mac had long ago become accustomed to the fact that real firefights, unlike the versions in John Wayne movies, often had long lulls of nothing happening, punctuated by brief outbursts of evil. Sometimes the quiet parts were the worst parts. The periods of hyperalertness during the lulls burned up a lot of adrenaline, because one never truly knew whether the fighting had finally ceased and those still alive were victorious and safe, or whether a new surge of chaos was only a breath away.

  Sometimes, just when the “all clear” seemed about to be called, the real trouble revealed itself.

  This was one of those times.

  The nearly five-minute lull that had followed Dmitri’s prayer felt longer than any hour. It ended with a series of explosions, bringing with them a growing brightness that in its own turn brought heat—and strangest of all: in moments such as this, there was actually time for Mac to take notice of objects illuminated by the afterglow of an explosion, and even to be thinking how surreal it felt to be seeing and hearing everything during the second in which he threw himself protectively over Yanni’s back. After the five-minute lull was broken, Mac’s mind was so busy snatching up details and analyzing them in
neurological overdrive that he lived fully in a netherworld of slowed time. A hatch from an autoclave and pieces of incubation equipment landed on the floor and he recognized, only in passing and with no sense of emotion, that a Russian microbiology lab must have blown apart nearby.

  It never ceased to amaze Mac how quiet the peak moments of a disaster tended to be: Dmitri throwing his body over Nesbitt, Boulle over Cousteau, with nothing louder than a grunt. No one shouted. No one screamed. They simply acted and assessed and reacted.

  The exterior wall failed—just yawned open—but Mac’s battle-focused senses and reflexes responded quickly enough to detect a glint of metal and begin a full-body duck-and-compress-Yanni-into-the-ground maneuver—which, in that part of a second, amounted to mere inches gained, but which also made all the difference in the world for both of them. A whizzing disk of copper cut through hair and skin near the bottom of Mac’s hairline, instead of gouging a path through the base of his skull.

  Utter confusion. Too much was happening and in too many directions. The view outdoors, through the blown-apart wall, made it difficult to avoid the impression that Russian commandos were firing on their own compound. Flashes of tracer fire were coming from the direction Mac believed to be the encampment’s outer perimeter. Then came a new burst of yellow-orange light, knocking away more of the wall. Half of someone’s leg flew in with pulverized masonry and landed near Yanni’s shoulder. The tip of a Kraken limb, split almost wide open, still gripped the leg.

  The dust in the air tasted of salt.

  A new lull followed, during which Yanni’s hand found two spoons in the dust and gravel. She began clicking them together in a rhythm that was by now all too hauntingly familiar to Mac.

  Footsteps raced toward them from outside. One of Dmitri’s men stumbled in and fell onto his back. The commando’s face was untouched but the rest of his body had been horribly mutilated by an explosion, or by Kraken, or by both.

  Two more Russians ran in behind the dying man—uninjured. A flurry of barked orders followed them and three commandos entered the ruin with two American submariners taken prisoner.

  By Mac’s assessment, the Russians were still a coordinated unit despite the outbursts of full-on chaos. They were “mopping up” during a lull that seemed likely, this time, to be long-lasting.

  One commando kicked the two spoons out of Yanni’s hand and another pointed a gun at Mac.

  Behind them, Nora Nesbitt had found a paper clip, straightened it out, and was now digging around in her mouth as if suddenly in desperate need to be using a toothpick.

  What the hell is she up to now? Mac wondered.

  July 10, 1948

  10:35 p.m., Thirty Minutes After Moment Zero

  3:35 p.m., Eastern Standard Time

  Washington, D.C.

  The brief from Albert Einstein’s conference on “The Future of War” could not have been more grim. Only a few of the signatories were familiar to President Truman, including atom bomb expert Luis Alvarez, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, and futurist Arthur C. Clarke. All forty came from different and sometimes competing fields of science and engineering, but each of them agreed on what they had signed: a Russian atom bomb might be built sooner than anyone anticipated. And then, in less than a decade, the Soviet Union might be capable of mating the bomb with a rocket. “Mutual de-nuclearization” was the recommendation; but they noted that, looking to humanity’s past as an intensely territorial animal, one could expect only the worst.

  Einstein noted, “If only I had truly foreseen what applications lay hidden within my shortest equation, I’d have remained a violinist and designer of refrigerators.”

  Finally, even without the Russian threat, the forecast was for wars to grow worse because human populations were continuing to fractionate into antagonistic groups. And worst of all, the splitting groups would inevitably be unable to migrate away from each other, and would be forced against each other, border against hardening border, by population numbers that were beginning to surge across the earth at a frightening rate.

  “Even with the agricultural Green Revolution now spreading from America across much of the world,” the report said, “by the time our population reaches nine billion, we may suddenly see the planet’s carrying capacity drop to only seven billion. When that happens, within the lifetimes of your own children (or your grandchildren at the very latest), we will face a human rights dilemma like none our species has ever seen. And the fight will go nuclear.”

  So, what are they trying to tell me? Truman asked himself. That if we don’t stop curing diseases, Rome falls?

  He placed the brief into a large envelope and was marking it to be classified when Bobby arrived outside the office door and asked, “Have you heard the latest?”

  The president closed the envelope. “If it’s more glad tidings of the sort I’ve just been reading, I’d prefer you keep it to yourself.”

  “Well, two things: Prisoner exchange plans are getting more complicated by the hour. And the Russians have come across our lost aircraft carrier.”

  “Intrepid?”

  “Yes. We’ve now got two of Stalin’s top pilots. They came in on jets.”

  “We shot them down?”

  “They shot at us.”

  “Whoa! Damn it! Somebody’s got a pair of brass ones.”

  Bobby eased into a wide chair opposite the president. “There’s more. And you’re not going to like it.”

  July 10, 1948

  11:05 p.m., One Hour after Moment Zero

  Intrepid, Five Miles Offshore of Santorini

  Barely more than a half hour after transmission of the target beacon from Nesbitt’s teeth, the location had been triangulated to the fires outside of Akrotiri. Lieutenant Tucker was now on deck, watching the final preflight check of three Hellcats and their bombs. Americans assigned to dive-bomb Americans. What could be more horrible?

  The first plane’s engine was already running, ready for taxying into place, when suddenly it cut off.

  Reprieve? Tucker asked himself.

  Christian stepped up beside him, holding a folded sheet of paper. “Looks like the Russkies nailed our extraction team,” he said. “That means more prisoners. But on our side, not counting the two we’ve got in the brig, the word from Washington is that we’ve captured some definitely high-value spy-ring people back home.”

  “That word’s from Washington, not Tokyo—not the general?”

  “Yes. Washington. MacArthur’s on his own in Japan right now. Whatever’s going on between those two, the general has definitely backed off from this, one hundred percent. It’s Truman’s game, now—and Admiral Rickover’s show.”

  Tucker’s shoulders relaxed as the three planes stood down from mission-ready to high state of preparedness. “So, how do we play it?”

  “Prisoner exchange. Washington wants Nesbitt most of all. In her case, it’s as if the Russians have captured Einstein himself. Except that, were it Einstein, I don’t think they’d be saying ‘dead or alive.’ They had the same priority for a guy who worked directly with her. His name was Hata, a Japanese.”

  “Was?”

  “The Greeks located Nesbitt’s initial campsite. They found a shallow grave there. There’s a Japanese in it—probably Hata.”

  Tucker shook his head. “Sure wish I knew what she’s up to that’s so important.”

  “Knowing that, died a quick death for both of us before the question could even be asked. All I’ve been told is that she’s some sort of biologist.”

  “More important than if Einstein was captured?”

  “Yeah. We’ll never know what they’re looking for out there, but at a guess, the last war began drawing to a close with nightmares the chemists unleashed over Dresden and Tokyo. It finished up with nightmares the physicists created. Next time? Guess it’ll be Nesbitt’s field.”

  “You really think there’ll be a next time?”

  “Look around you,” the captain said. “Below these very waters are a
dozen ships from World War One. They called it ‘the war to end all wars.’”

  “Got it,” the lieutenant said. “The number came later.” He looked away toward the isle of Kea, where he knew history’s largest hospital ship was sunk during World War I. The number came later, he thought again, and kept the next obvious conclusion to himself. Lieutenant Tucker suspected that Captain Christian—who believed that projecting power was the greatest hope that America had for preventing World War III—might not want to hear his thought voiced too loudly: That it is not our mistakes which count against our survival, but the frequency with which we repeat those same mistakes.

  July 11, 1948

  Sunrise

  Santorini

  R. J. MacCready imagined that negotiations between the White House and the Kremlin must have been growing quite intense.

  Shortly after 2:00 a.m., a helicopter from the Intrepid had made the first, tentative prisoner exchange. As a practice run with ground flares for guidance, the exchange ran smoothly. The two Russian pilots were landed in trade for Alan and the two Frenchmen, but Cousteau insisted on remaining behind and McQueen was traded in his place.

  Two hours later, Dmitri received radio confirmation about the successful departure from LaGuardia Airport of a plane carrying three midlist Russian agents who had been swept up in what was now becoming known as “the coin-boy incident.” In exchange, Walter, Captain John, and another of Nesbitt’s surviving Catalina crew were “freed for reassignment” to the Intrepid.

  Mac appreciated the strategic blunder in the trade: the Russians did not know yet that either Walter or his captain would have been worth six of Stalin’s A-list spies. Identified only by well-known aliases established during the war years, they were regarded as merely two surviving members of a thoroughly botched rescue attempt.

  At 4:20 a.m., they were helicoptered away from the still-smoldering encampment.