“Look, Captain Murray’s turning Enterprise into the wind,” Pembroke told Oliver as the carrier swung slowly east.
“Standard procedure for launching a squadron,” Flume elaborated. “With such a short runway, you want lotsa wind under everybody’s wings.”
Ensign Reid brought the PBY to two thousand feet, then leveled her off and looped around, giving his passengers a clear view of the flight deck. Dressed in green anoraks, a foul-weather crew scurried about, chopping the ice apart with pickaxes and pushing the fragments over the side with coal shovels. A yellow-suited firehose crew finished the job, aiming their nozzles at the runway and letting loose torrents of liquid de-icer.
“Here comes Torpedo Six,” said Pembroke as, wings folded, two Devastators rode their respective elevators to the flight deck.
Taking care not to be swept overboard by the prop wash, a quartet of blue-suited plane handlers ran to the forward Devastator, 6-T-9, unchocking the wheels and spreading the wings, whereupon the pilot turned 180 degrees and taxied amidships. As the signal officer waved his batons, the pilot turned again, revved his engine, and sped down the runway, de-icer spewing from his wheels. Oliver half expected the plane to crash into the sea, but instead some God-made law took over — the Bernoulli effect, he believed it was called — lifting 6-T-9 off the bow and high above the waves.
“The Devastators need a head start over the dive bombers,” Pembroke explained as 6-T-ll joined her airborne twin. Both planes circled the carrier, awaiting the rest of their section. “Slow devils, those Devastators. They were obsolete even before the first one rolled off the assembly line.”
Oliver exhaled sharply, fogging the mechanic’s window. “Obsolete? Oh?”
“Hey, not to worry, fella,” said Pembroke.
“Your golem’s good as dead,” said Flume.
“And if worst comes to worst, we’ve always got Op Plan 29-67.”
“Exactly. Op Plan 29-67.”
“What’s Op Plan 29-67?” asked Oliver.
“You’ll see.”
“You’ll love it.”
Two by two, the Devastators continued to arrive, taxiing, revving, taking off. By 0815 the entire first-strike section of Torpedo Six was aloft, fifteen planes arranging themselves into three V-shaped formations. A delicious inevitability hung in the air, a sense of Rubicons crossed and bridges burned, like nothing Oliver had experienced since he and Sally Morgenthau had relieved each other of their respective virginities following a Grateful Dead concert in 1970. My God, he’d thought at the time — my God, we’re actually doing it.
“Let’s hit the road, Ensign,” Flume barked into his intercom mike. “We mustn’t be late for the ball.”
Turning the control yoke thirty degrees, Jack Reid’s portrayer pushed back on the throttle. Oliver, pulse racing (actually doing it, actually doing it), put on his headset. Pembroke leafed through a wartime issue ofStars and Stripes. Flume opened a Tupperware container and removed a Spam-and-onion sandwich. Over the intercom, Ensign Eaton’s portrayer whistled “Embraceable You.” Strawberry Eleven flew alongside the sun, soaring at seventy knots above a range of mammoth icebergs as she chased Lieutenant Commander Lindsey’s brave squadron east across the Norwegian Sea.
In his short but busy career as an able-bodied seaman, Neil Weisinger had helmed every sort of merchant ship imaginable, from reefers to Great Lakes freighters, bulk carriers to Ro-Ros, but he’d never before taken the wheel of anything so weird as the SS Carpco Maracaibo.
“Come right to zero-two-zero,” commanded the officer on duty, Mick Katsakos, a swarthy Cretan in white bell-bottoms, an oil-stained parka, and a Greek fisherman’s cap.
“Right to zero-two-zero,” echoed Neil, working the wheel.
He’d certainly heard of such vessels, these Persian Gulf tankers outfitted with an eye to the political realities of the Middle East. When filled to her Plimsoll line, a Gulf tanker bore only half the load of a conventional ULCC, yet she displaced a third more water. A single glance at the Maracaibo’s silhouette was sufficient to explain this disparity. Three Phalanx 20mm cannon sat atop her fo’c’sle; six Meroka 12-barrel guns jutted from her stern; fifty Westland Lynx Mk-15 depth charges clung to her bulwarks. Missile-wise, the Maracaibo achieved the elusive ideal of multiculturalism: Crotales from France, Aspides from Italy, Sea Darts from Britain, Homing Hawks from Israel. Since adding a dozen Persian Gulf tankers to her shipping fleet, Carpco’s stock had risen eleven points.
“Steady,” said Katsakos.
“Steady,” echoed Neil.
It was damn hairy, this business of maneuvering at high speed through the bergs and floes of the Norwegian Sea. Despite his second-mate status, Katsakos did not seem like a particularly smart or experienced sailor (the day before, he’d led them six leagues off course before noticing his error), and Neil did not really trust him to guide the tanker safely. Neil’s fervent wish was that the Maracaibo’s captain himself would appear on the bridge and take over.
“Ten degrees left rudder.”
“Ten left.”
But the captain never appeared on the bridge — or anywhere else, for that matter. He was as aloof and inaccessible as the immaterial God whom Neil had failed to find during his self-imposed exile on Van Horne Island. At times he wondered whether the Maracaibo even had a master.
For the first three days, Neil’s penance had gone well. The sun had been suitably hot, his hunger appropriately painful, his thirst fittingly intense (he’d allowed himself no more than a pint of dew every four hours). Perched in his petrified fig tree like some crazed, outcast, spiritually famished vulture, Neil had struggled to gain the universe’s attention. “You appeared to Moses! You appeared to Job!” he’d cried into the fog, over and over until his tongue became so dry the words stuck to it like burrs. “Now appear to me!”
Looking out to sea, Neil had been astonished to behold a Persian Gulf tanker, gravid with cargo and lying at anchor in the very cove from which the Valparaíso had recently departed. An hour later, a Falstaffian man with bad skin appeared at the base of his tree, swathed in the island’s eternal mist.
“And who might you be?” demanded the intruder in a musical Italian accent. Terra-cotta sand clung to his vinyl cassock, muting the bright red silk.
“Able Seaman Weisinger of the United States Merchant Marine,” he mumbled, certain he was about to faint.
“Tullio Cardinal Di Luca of the Vatican. You may address me as Eminence. Are you with the Carpco Valparaíso?”
“Not anymore.” A wave of vertigo. Neil feared he might fall from the tree. “I’m marooned, Eminence. Last time I saw the Val, she was headed for the Arctic.”
“Strange. Your captain was ordered to return to this island. Evidently he’s following his own star.”
“Evidently.”
“Was it Van Horne who marooned you?”
“I marooned myself.”
“Oh?”
“To find God,” Neil explained. The holes in Cardinal Di Luca’s face suggested a child’s connect-the-dots puzzle. What constellation would emerge if you drew a line from pock to pock? Ophiuchus, Neil guessed. Serpent Bearer. “The God beyond God. The God of the four A.M. watch. En Sof.”