The Darwin Strain Read online

  “Yeah, it’s a weird one.”

  “Well then gimme the thirty-second version.”

  “Let’s see. On the right we’ve got the Greek government army. Their leaders were exiled during the war, and while they were gone things went to shit. Of course, that’s who we’re backing. And on the left, there are the communist partisans.”

  “Who weaseled their way into the vacuum left by the Nazis.”

  “You got it,” Mac said.

  “Lemme guess. Backed by Stalin and his mob.”

  “You’d think so, right?” Mac said, flashing the smile he reserved for the rare occasions when Yanni got something wrong. “But actually, no—it’s been mostly Yugoslavia and their own commie heartthrob, Tito. Stalin actually opposes the fight.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Hates Tito, plus Stalin’s picking his fights carefully. And Greece ain’t it.”

  “Got it,” Yanni said.

  Mac watched as Yanni flipped the tail half of a “cocktail blue” into Junior’s waiting maw, which chomped closed with a crunch. “We should be okay, though. Most of that political shit’s taking place on the Greek mainland and north of Athens.”

  “Oh yeah, sounds completely safe,” Yanni said, sounding somewhat less than convinced. “So why Santorini then?”

  “Well, you remember the white stuff and the red stuff in Tibet?”

  “You’re such a zoologist,” she replied. “You mean the fungus that could speed up evolution?”

  “Yeah, among other things.”

  “So?”

  “So, a coupla weeks ago Hendry gets a message from Tse-lin, of all people.”

  “At Santorini? Wasn’t he tracking down fossils in Africa?”

  “He was. Until he gets sent to Greece.”

  “Wouldn’t a thunk there’d be much paleoanthropology to be done near a volcano.”

  “No, you wouldn’t think so. But there he was—following a lead about weird fossils—digging away nice and peaceful like.”

  “And then?”

  “And then he learns about some big ruckus that’s got everyone worked up. Long story short, sounds to him like the red stuff.”

  Yanni shot him an incredulous look. “Coming out of the volcano?”

  “Sort of,” Mac replied. “In the water—spewing out of a thermal vent on the lagoon floor.”

  “This is the same microbe we found in Tibet?”

  “Something similar but I can’t imagine a fungus from Tibet blowing out of a thermal vent all the way in the Mediterranean. Tse-lin says it acts the same—cures, healing, the whole shebang.”

  “As in ‘The world’s greatest cure or its deadliest weapon.’”

  “Yeah, that shebang,” Mac replied with a nod. “Darwin amok.”

  Yanni let out a deep breath and glanced back at Junior, who was clearly anticipating his next course. In response, she tossed a baseball-bat-length eel toward the middle of the pool. Then she crossed her arms above her head, signaling that snack time was over.

  “Look,” Mac continued, “we knew we couldn’t keep a lid on this forever—that we’d be drawn back in somehow. I guess we just convinced ourselves we had more time, stopped believing it could be so soon.”

  “Great,” Yanni said, staring across the pool. “What else?”

  Mac gave a funeral laugh. “Well, this is the part where things go to hell. Seems three French divers head down to investigate the discovery . . .”

  “Yeah, and?”

  “And two of ’em got torn apart.”

  “What, sharks?” Yanni replied. “I hate sharks.”

  “No. Not sharks. Apparently something a bit more—well, more exotic. I happen to know the guy who survived—solid credentials. And he says this is something none of us have seen before.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Knew you’d think so.”

  “So is Tse-lin still there?”

  Mac nodded. “Barely. Until Hendry doubly reassured him we were going in, he was lookin’ to get out of Dodge.”

  Yanni shot him a quizzical look.

  “Santorini,” Mac corrected himself.

  “You blame him?” Yanni said. “The return of our ‘red stuff,’ something tearing divers apart.” She shook her head. “Sounds like the perfect vacation spot.”

  “And don’t forget the civil war,” Mac added cheerily.

  “Sure,” Yanni said. “We can’t have the locals gettin’ along.”

  “Nah, that would set an uncomfortable precedent,” Mac said. “Hey, look on the bright side: at least we won’t be freezing our butts off this time, right?”

  “I suppose,” Yanni said, watching skeptically as Mac unfolded the top of a cardboard box he’d brought.

  “But there is one more thing.”

  “How’d I guess?”

  “No, this one’s okay. In fact it’ll give us an interesting cover story.”

  Mac gently removed a small, beautifully preserved fossil skull from the box.

  “That looks familiar.”

  “It is. It’s a chimp, or something close to it. Tse-lin thinks it’s some lost branch of the bonobos. Knight agrees with him.”

  “That’s nice—those little pygmy guys, right?” She lifted the skull and gently turned it over. “But why’s that so important?”

  “The kicker’s what our Chinese pal found alongside the bones.”

  “Go on,” Yanni said, allowing impatience to creep into her voice.

  Mac reached into the box again, withdrew a small object, and held it out to her. Then he gestured toward the skull. “Seems like Cheeta made this.”

  “Ancient chimps crafting stone tools. Get the hell out of here!”

  Mac replied with a wry smile.

  “How long ago?”

  “Oh, we’re thinking something like five million years—give or take a million.”

  “Holy shit,” Yanni said. “You are kiddin’ me, right?”

  Mac stifled a laugh.

  5 Million Years to Santorini

  When the great sea was already ancient, of an age most people scarcely dream, continents were being reshaped and the stage was being set for a focus of human forces. Two million years before the arrival of Santorini’s tool makers, Africa had been a raft of land, adrift on a collision course with southern Spain. At the point of impact between Morocco and Gibraltar, the seabed crumpled and a new mountain range bulged four thousand feet into the clouds, forming a natural dam that completely sealed off the Atlantic from the Mediterranean.

  As rocks and continents measured time, the Gibraltar Dam formed and the entire Mediterranean Sea began to dry out in a geologic heartbeat; yet, from Mac’s and Yanni’s perspective on time, that single heartbeat would have lasted twenty thousand generations. Aside from the occasional earthquake, no ancestral humans could have noticed the change—given even a whole lifetime of watching, even as it happened before their eyes.

  The universe was filled with such contrasts, and in Mac’s generation, Harold “Doc” Edgerton reveled in them. Having invented a method for filming the first split second of an atomic bomb test in ultra-slow motion, he next time-lapsed entire years into seconds. Thus did he reveal the previously unobserved wonder of autumn reds and yellows alternating with flashes of snow and bursts of green while his cameras slowly panned across Massachusetts landscapes. By the time Mac and Yanni departed a Grumman airfield on Long Island for the isle of Santorini, Edgerton had already begun advising stop-motion film animator George Pal, who would soon transform H. G. Wells’s novel about a time traveler into a feature-length film depicting a journey across 802,701 years.

  To Edgerton and Pal, even the slow and stately transitions of ancient Gibraltar could be perceived as a symphony of motion. To them, the centuries required for the entire Mediterranean to evaporate behind the dam and form a canyon deeper and wider than any the planet had known in more than a hundred million years could be viewed across the span of a minute. Below Santorini and Crete, and as far south as Egy
pt, deep blue waters flashed to desert. Forests flowed in, spreading across the land like puffs of green vapor. And then, blue floodwaters. And desert again. Forests.

  By 5.4 million years b.c., a chancy sort of balance had been achieved in the uneasy marriage between two continental plates. For more than 600,000 years, now, the Gibraltar Dam stood strong. Two miles beneath the limestone plain on which the pyramids would make their stand against time, the Nile flowed north along the Mediterranean floor. It fed scores of lakes and oases, before being stopped near Crete and the deep waters of the Devil’s Hole. At the hole’s edge, great fissures yawned open. Volcanic fountains sent forth streams of water laced so thickly with red microbes that they grew like wool on the rocks.

  In the incomparably dense, humid, and richly oxygenated air, relatives of clams, snails, and squids evolved to fill niches never occupied by their kind before. Insects and spiders failed to thrive in the great Mediterranean canyon. There were no ants, no termites, and no mosquitoes. The mollusks had seen to that.

  Sea butterflies transitioned from graceful swimmers into the air—first as gliders, then exhibiting powered flight. With no aerial competitors, they diversified into myriad shapes and sizes—convergence imparting them with color patterns that would have seemed familiar to any twentieth-century birdwatcher.

  But the land two miles below Spain, Greece, and Africa remained inhospitable to outsiders and so the ancestral elephants that occasionally migrated down from the green Sahara highlands did not stay for very long. They were smart enough to know better.

  Chapter 3

  Adaptation

  I was very careful in the selection of my ancestors.

  —Ernst Mayr

  A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.

  —Samuel Butler

  But only God can hatch a dragon.

  —from a Greek Orthodox tradition regarding the apostle Philip’s travels

  June 28, 1948

  The Airstrip at Santorini, Greece

  R. J. MacCready and Yanni Thorne exited the dual-engine Cessna Bobcat and stood on a pebble-and shell-strewn tarmac. Dubbed the Bamboo Bomber by airmen, the light transport had pounded down hard onto a short, war-time airstrip. Although most visitors still arrived by boat, the flight from Athens had saved them at least two full days. While Mac and the pilot hauled supplies out of the plane, Yanni could see two men exiting a nearby truck. Mac paused in his hauling and gave one of them, their friend Wang Tse-lin, a handshake that turned into a bear hug. Tse-lin broke from the hug and waved excitedly toward Yanni.

  Yanni returned the wave but after shooting the Chinese scientist a warm smile looked away from the second man—whom she’d never seen before—with the awkwardness she usually felt upon meeting new people.

  “We will see you later at the hotel,” Tse-lin said to his companion, who seemed to sense Yanni’s unease and headed promptly for the stack of deplaned supplies. Without a word of greeting, the stranger began carrying their gear toward the truck, whistling a distinctly creepy rendition of “The Colonel Bogey March” as he went.

  Yanni watched as the balding whistler loaded a canvas bag packed with a rather unique assortment of field gear and automatic weapons. “So, Wang, who’s your pal?”

  “That is Pierre.”

  “Okay,” she said, “another French guy but not the French guy?”

  “Right. This one is my colleague. Plants rubber trees. Blows things up. Now he digs fossils.”

  “Interesting resume,” Mac added, with a touch of genuine admiration. “Pierre who?”

  “Boulle,” Tse-lin replied, then turned to Yanni. “Other real French guy is Jacques.”

  Yanni nodded. “And he’s still being held by the authorities?”

  “Yes,” Tse-lin said, somberly. “They have many questions for him.”

  Their friend ushered Mac and Yanni to a car he had rented, and held the door as they climbed in. The car was prewar, well maintained, comfortable. “You go to the hotel, get an hour’s rest? A meal?”

  Mac shook his head. “Where’s Cousteau being held?”

  “Police station.”

  “Then we’re going to the police station.”

  “This ought to be fun,” Yanni said, staring out the window at the lagoon.

  “Could be big trouble,” Tse-lin said. Yanni could not see his face, but she had no doubt that he was trying to size up Mac’s mood through the rearview mirror, as a compass setting for what was to come.

  Like every other building on the island, the Santorini police station was a low, white, and boxy affair. Like most of his countrymen, Jacques Cousteau understood at least a grade schooler’s level of Greek but, in keeping with French tradition, pretended not to. He simply listened, and assessed.

  Cousteau had been inside for more than six hours, much of that time spent sitting on an uncomfortable wooden chair while the head gendarme looked for someone who could more fluently speak and translate French. Once this was accomplished, Cousteau had been grilled unceasingly about the incident in the lagoon—reported as a strange accident that claimed three lives, one of them a well-known local. The real problem arose after he explained that several large sharks, in some sort of feeding frenzy, had destroyed the boat.

  “I do not believe you are telling me everything, monsieur.” This became the most oft-repeated phrase in what had rapidly degenerated from a polite conversation into un interrogatoire.

  “Il ne reste plus rien à dire,” Cousteau insisted. There was nothing left to tell. Nous avons été attaqués par plusieurs requins. He turned from the translator to the policeman. “Καρχαρίες! Sharks!”

  The policeman crossed his arms. No translation required, Cousteau thought.

  The problem was, that after a tearful meeting with the boatman’s wife, the Greek officer was now intent on sending his own divers down to recover whatever remains the widow might be able to properly bury.

  But also, Cousteau reasoned, to see if perhaps I murdered my own friends and someone’s beloved husband.

  With their safety in mind, Cousteau had been adamant that they must not send divers. However, in retrospect, he now believed he had probably been a bit too adamant in that regard.

  Sometimes saying the right thing doesn’t change anything, Cousteau thought. Except to make it worse.

  “Okay, who’s running the show around here?” Mac said, barging into the sleepy-looking police station and waking the man behind a clutter-strewn desk from his midday reading.

  The man shouted something in Greek. Tse-lin, who had entered with Yanni, scrambled forward to translate. “He wants to know who the—who you are?”

  MacCready produced a handful of official-looking paperwork and waved it at the man. “Captain R. J. MacCready, U.S. Army. Does anyone speak English around here? We haven’t got all day.”

  Tse-lin relayed the message and the man quickly ducked into a back room. A fireplug-shaped bruiser emerged, his face well tanned and unsmiling. “What this is about, Mr.—?”

  “Captain MacCready. And what is your name, sir?”

  “Sergeant Demetrius Papandreas,” the man announced, in clear but heavily accented English.

  Yanni started writing in a small notebook. “Is that two p’s or one, Sergeant?”

  The officer shot her a suspicious look. “One p,” he said. “And who are you?”

  Mac jumped back in. “This is Special Agent Thorne. Sergeant, are you aware that the man you’re currently holding prisoner is working on a joint mission of international importance—a collaboration between the French and American governments and one that has the full cooperation of your own government?”

  “I . . . I . . . he is not a prisoner,” the cop shot back, defensively.

  Yanni, who continued to write, looked up and shot the man a mirthless smile. “Then please bring Lieutenant Cousteau out here immediately so we can verify that he has not been harmed.”

  “Harmed? Nobody touched him,” the officer replied.

 
; Mac stepped in. “Sergeant Papandreas, I’m sure you know that Lieutenant Cousteau has recently gone through a horribly traumatic experience in which two of his close friends were violently killed in a shark attack.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Excuse me,” Mac said, shuffling through the papers he was holding before stopping to read one. “We know that a local man was killed as well, a husband and father of three children.”

  Yanni addressed the man solemnly, their bluster momentarily set aside. “Our commanders noted that this heroic individual did not flee when the trouble began, and died trying to save our people.”

  Mac continued: “Somehow the word ‘condolences’ is not big enough.”

  The policeman nodded in appreciation.

  Cousteau appeared in the doorway.

  “Lieutenant Cousteau.” Mac came to attention and saluted.

  “Ma—Captain, MacCready,” Cousteau responded, returning the salute and a rather confused expression.

  Mac turned to his two friends. “Of course you know Dr. Wang Tse-lin. And this is Special Agent Thorne.”

  Yanni snapped off her own salute, which Cousteau returned.

  Mac handed the policeman a slip of paper. “Sergeant Papandreas, if you have any further questions, you should call this number. If not, on behalf of the U.S. Army and President Truman, your cooperation is greatly appreciated.”

  He gestured to Yanni, who held up her notebook and tapped it with a pen.

  Within a minute, and with no further fuss at all, the quartet was headed toward the waiting car. “Special Agent Thorne?” Yanni said, under her breath.

  Mac allowed himself a wry smile but remained silent.

  “Whose phone number did you give that sergeant guy anyway? Not Hendry’s?”

  “Nah,” Mac said, finally. “It was something I saw on a poster in the Athens airport. I think it’s a cab company.”

  Once they pulled away from the police station, Mac turned to Cousteau, who was looking morose. “Jacques, long time no see. Too long.”

  The Frenchman shook off his sorrowful expression for a moment. “Mac, I want to thank you. Thank you all for—”