“Yeah, she stayed afloat even after McClusky unloaded one of his eggs right down her aft smokestack,” said Spruance. “Hey, don’t get worried, son. We’ll be dropping fifty times more TNT on your golem than we did on Soryu.” The admiral vaulted athletically from the barge to the gangway. “Best torpedoes and demolition bombs in the whole damn navy. State-of-the-art ordnance.”
Disembarking, Oliver followed Spruance up the wobbly stairs, a route that took them directly past an open hangar bay. A middle-aged sailor in an ensign’s uniform stood hunched over the fuselage of a TBD-1 Devastator, tinkering with the engine.
“The way we figure it,” said Oliver, calling above the growl of the pack ice, “the Valparaíso won’t cross the circle till five or six days from now.”
“Okay, but we’d better start sending patrols out right away, just to make sure,” said Spruance. “Our PBYs will get the job done. State-of-the-art reconnaissance.”
“Any danger of the Val slipping past us?”
Spruance looked Oliver in the eye. The Arctic wind tousled the admiral’s dapple-gray hair. “A PBY is the finest search plane of its day, Mr. Shostak. Understand? The finest of its day.”
“What day?”
“Nineteen forty-two.”
“But it’s nineteen ninety-two.”
“That’s a matter of opinion. Anyway, we got brand-new radar equipment on Enterprise’s bridge.”
“State-of-the-art radar?” Oliver was feeling better now. The Devastator was a truly fearsome-looking machine. It radiated a kind of technological haughtiness, metal’s contempt for flesh.
“State-of-the-art radar,” echoed Ray Spruance’s portrayer with an emphatic thumbs-up. “Panasonic all the way.”
A low, steady growl. A sharp, gut-deep ache. Hunger? wondered Neil Weisinger, cracking into consciousness. Yes, that was the word, hunger.
Freeing himself from the knot of sleeping, snoring bodies, the young AB glanced at his digital watch. August 10. Wednesday. Nine A.M. Damn, he’d been asleep two whole days. His eyes itched. His bladder spasmed. Slowly he picked his way through the wreckage — the Miller Lite cans and Cook’s champagne bottles, the chicken bones and eggshells, the raunchy CDs and X-rated videocassettes — and, after walking stark naked through the southern arcade, peed copiously on a lovely bucolic fresco depicting a herd of rams gang-banging a buxom shepherdess.
“Quite a blowout,” groaned Charlie Horrocks, joining Neil at the improvised urinal.
“The social event of the season,” mumbled Neil. Lord, it was glorious being a pagan. The choices were so simple. Vodka, rum, or beer? Oral, anal, or vaginal?
“Somebody’s been playin’ football with my head,” said the pumpman.
“Somebody’s been playin’ billiards with my balls,” said Neil. Their revels, clearly, had ended, though whether this was because even pagans grow weary of pleasure or because the party had run out of fuel (no more beer in the kegs, soup in the kettles, bread in the baskets, jism in the testes), the AB couldn’t say. “What’s for breakfast?”
“Beats me.”
In the western arcade, a large and resonant stomach grumbled. Another took up the cry. A third joined in. A choral gurgling filled the air, as if the museum were honeycombed with defective storm drains. Stumbling aimlessly toward the banquet table, Neil grew suddenly aware of how encrusted he was, how wide the variety of dried substances clinging to his skin and matting his hair. He felt like an extension of the island itself, a repository for waste.
“I could eat a cow,” said Juanita Torres, slipping into a silk chemise.
“A herd of cows,” said Ralph Mungo. “A generation of cows.”
But there were no cattle on Van Horne Island.
“Hey, we got ourselves a problem here,” said Dolores Haycox, the ranking officer among the deserters now that Joe Spicer had been disemboweled with a stockless anchor. She spoke tentatively, as if uncertain whether to assume command or not. Should she elect to do so, Neil decided, she’d best put on some clothes. “I think we ought to, you know, talk,” rasped the third mate.
Potable water, everyone agreed, wasn’t an issue: the omnipresent fog continually deposited gallons of dew in the city’s various cisterns and gutters. Food was a different matter. Even with stringent rationing, there probably weren’t enough provisions left to satisfy their appetites for more than a day.
“Jeez … I feel so stupid,” said Mungo.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” said Torres.
“Stupid as an ox,” said Ramsey.
“If we dwell on the past,” said Haycox, slinging a tattered canvas seabag around her waist, “we’ll go mad.”
Ramsey wanted them to start scouring the island immediately. Despite its seeming sterility, he argued, the place might very well harbor a few stranded crustaceans or an edible species of kelp. But the revelers had seen far too many acres of lifeless mud and barren sand to work up much enthusiasm for this idea.
Horrocks suggested they go back to the Valparaíso and beg for a portion of whatever scraps they might have overlooked while looting the ship. This scenario sounded promising until James Echohawk pointed out that, if any such supplies existed, the loyalists had no reason to be generous with them.
It was Haycox who offered genuine hope. They must fashion a raft from the banquet table, she argued, and send it east. After reaching civilization — Portugal, most probably, though maybe Morocco was nearer — its crew would hunt out the authorities and arrange for a rescue ship to be dispatched. If the raft proved incapable of such a journey, her crew would return forthwith to Van Horne Island, laden with the deep-sea fish they were certain to catch along the way.
On Haycox’s orders the deserters got dressed and spent the morning scavenging. They cut the fat from hambones, dug pulp out of apricot pits, clawed bits of egg from shell fragments, pried globs of Chef Boyardee ravioli from steel cans, and chiseled nuggets of pizza from the flagstones. Once the museum itself was picked clean, the mariners retraced their steps to the amphitheater, following the path of their prodigality, gathering up each orange rind and banana peel as if it were a priceless gem.
Entering the arena, Neil was momentarily bewildered to realize that the corpses of Wheatstone, Jaworski, and Spicer were nowhere to be seen, but then he noticed a mound of mud in the center of the field, evidence that someone — Father Thomas, quite likely — had buried them. An unholy odor rose from the grave, so intense it instantly killed any notion of solving the incipient famine through the ingestion of former shipmates.
By 1530 the pagans were back in the city, sorting through the day’s harvest. It came to a little over thirty pounds, which Haycox divided into two equal stockpiles, storing the first in a seabag — bait, she explained — and parceling out the second on the spot. Greedily Neil grabbed his allotment, a conglomeration of apple cores, Concord grapes, and frankfurter stubs welded together with Turkish taffy and melted cheddar cheese. Staking out a shady spot beneath the banquet table, he sat down, lit a Marlboro, and puffed.
He stared at his meal. A sharp moan broke from his larynx. This wasn’t food. It was a travesty of food, a cruel impersonation of food, tormenting him the way a dead child’s voice torments its parents.
He devoured the ration in four big bites.
“I got a job for you.”
Neil looked up. Dolores Haycox stood over him, her stocky form now swathed in a beige Exxon jumpsuit.
“We need pontoons,” she said, handing Neil a set of battery-powered needle guns. “Four of ’em.”
“Aye-aye.”
“Take Mungo, Jong, and Echohawk. Locate some fifty-five-gallon drums. Good ones. Drain ’em.”
He took a drag on his Marlboro. “Gotcha.”
“We’re gonna get out of this mess, Weisinger.”
“You bet, Captain Haycox.”
After a half-hour’s hike across a mud flat riddled with aerosol cans and disposable diapers, Neil and his three shipmates reached the nearest chemical dump, a dark, viscous swamp where dozens of 55-gallon drums lay about like chunks of pineapple suspended in Jell-O. Most of the drums were fractured and leaking, but before long Mungo spotted a cluster that the dumpers, in an effort to either appease their consciences or cover their asses, had evidently sealed against saltwater corrosion. The sailors switched on their needle guns and got to work, chipping the rust from the caps with the radical caution of neurosurgeons severing frontal lobes: each cap had to be loosened but must not suffer damage in the process.