Paul McEuen - Spiral

LIAM CONNOR WAS SICK TO SEE IT, STANDING ON THE DECK of the USS North Dakota , binoculars trained on the sea. The truth was clear, the truth he saw in the binoculars, the four American sailors in the bright red lifeboat, all young and alive, none older than Connor himself.

“TURN BACK,” the commanding officer ordered through the megaphone.

“You can’t do this!” screamed one of the Americans. “I have a son. I’ve never seen my son!” He had his shirt off, waving it frantically back and forth, a fluttering white bird over the blue water. Two other men rowed.

“TURN AROUND. NOW. ”

Warning shots spat out of the Oerlikon twenty-millimeter deck cannons, the noise deafening, rapid-fire jackhammers, a strafe line between the lifeboat and the USS North Dakota . The men vanished behind a wall of sea spray.

The mist settled, the sea again quiet. The tall one jumped up and down, waving his damned white shirt, threatening to topple the small boat. “Stop firing!” he shouted. “We are not sick!”

“He’s lying,” said the Army general Willoughby. Willoughby was a few feet away from Liam on the foredeck, watching through his own field glasses, his lips drawn back, teeth clenched. “See the way he moves? He’s jumping out of his skin.”

On the bridge, the commanding officer of the North Dakota raised his megaphone. “TURN AROUND. THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING.”

Another spit of bullets from the guns, and the boat vanished again in a cloud of spray. This time the line was closer, near enough to soak the men. Connor saw fear clinging to their faces like the drops of water. If the gunner raised his sights by a few degrees, they’d be shredded.

The leader of the lifeboat sat down on the gunwale, the white shirt falling from his hands. The boat floated listlessly, slowly twisting while the four argued among themselves, their words carrying over the waves. The tall one pointed toward the North Dakota , shaking his head, mouthing the phrase No other way .

“The stupid bastards are coming,” Willoughby said.

The tall one stood, facing the North Dakota , held his white shirt overhead. “Go!” he called out, and the rowers began rowing, plowing the sea as hard and fast as they could.

The commander of the North Dakota stood straight. The megaphone hung at his side.

He gave a slight nod.

It was over in seconds. Two Oerlikons fired simultaneously, and the sea erupted. The lifeboat exploded red, fragmented into an array of splinters and planks of wood. In an instant, both the men and the lifeboat were gone, nothing left but the mist and a stain of flotsam and debris on the water.

Liam saw something moving, flopping on the surface. At first he thought it was a dying fish. But it wasn’t a fish. It was an arm, severed at the shoulder.

He vomited over the side of the ship.

LIAM CONNOR HAD SPENT FOUR YEARS IN THE BRITISH ARMY, but he had never seen men die like that. Liam was a small man, five-six, but strong-willed, wiry and tough. He was also Irish, with blond-red wavy hair and a complexion like putty stained with red ocher. He was tenacious, with a precocious, sharp mind and fast feet. He had started university at Cork at the age of fourteen and quickly established himself as a biology prodigy, on his way to a Ph.D. when the war intervened. He could also run a mile in just over four minutes fifteen seconds, making him the third fastest man in Ireland. He was a lieutenant, by the British Army’s reckoning more valuable as a scientist than a bullet catcher. Barely twenty-two years old, he’d spent the past four years at Porton Down, in the southwest English county of Wiltshire, the center of British chemical and germ weapons research. His specialty was saprobic fungi, the feeders on the dead.

He was a scientist. He’d never seen men die like that, killed by their own brothers-in-arms.

TWO DAYS AGO HE’D BEEN IN GERMANY, AT A CHEMICAL FACTORY outside Munich. He was in the final weeks of his military service, a member of an Allied team conducting a postmortem of the Nazi chemical and germ warfare program. He expected to leave Germany within days, return to England and on to Ireland and his wife, Edith. They’d been married for almost three years, but in that time had spent less than ten days together. He missed her like he missed Ireland.

Thirty-six hours before, his plans had drastically changed. Liam was shoved on a troop transport plane in Munich with no explanation. Four flights later, he found himself halfway around the world, over the Pacific, circling a flotilla of U.S. Navy vessels. They’d strapped him in a parachute and ordered him out, the first parachute jump of his life. He’d been fished out of the sea and brought aboard the USS North Dakota just in time to see the slaughter of the four sailors.

The whole journey over, he’d been wondering why. They’d grabbed a lieutenant and shipped him across the globe. Now he was starting to understand. At Porton, they’d spent months preparing for what they believed inevitable, the use of germ weapons by the Nazis. The Germans had been the first to use poison gas on a large scale in World War I—few at Porton doubted that this time around, the Nazis would use germs. They’d been wrong. It was the Japanese.

LIAM’S POINT OF CONTACT ON THE USS NORTH DAKOTA WAS a gangly major named Andy Scilla. He was a microbiologist from Mississippi who’d trained at Harvard but kept his accent. Scilla was from Camp Detrick in Maryland, the American center of chemical and germ warfare, their equivalent of Porton Down. “I’ll be your date while you’re here,” he said, his drawl at first difficult for Liam to follow. But he got used to it, got to like it. It reminded him of some of the boggers back home.

Liam spent his first hour with Scilla in a small cabin three doors down from the communications room. Here, Scilla said, they had copies of the medical records of the men on the infected ship, the USS Vanguard , along with a series of files they’d brought from Tokyo, giving background on what was happening. They were stored in a series of metal lockers to keep out the ever-present saltwater. Scilla gave Liam the chain of events: “Five days ago, the ship those men came from, the USS Vanguard , picked up a distress call from the Japanese sub out there, the I-17. No one could figure it out. Hell, it’s been six months since the end of the war. Where’s a Jap sub been hiding all that time?

“Once the Vanguard arrived, they found the I-17 dead in the water. They tried to establish radio contact, but they got zip. Absolutely nothing. But they could see a single Japanese soldier on the bow of the sub. Just sitting there. They hollered at him, but he didn’t move a muscle. So they sent a team to board.

“What they found was a nightmare. The entire crew, maybe a hundred men, sliced open like gutted fish. From the looks of it, they had committed hara-kiri en masse. All except that one Japanese soldier, alone on the bow of the sub. He looked catatonic, cross-legged, back straight, staring forward like a statue. The leader of the boarding crew, a chief petty officer named Maddox, thought he was in traumatic shock. But that wasn’t it. Not at all. He waited until they were practically next to him. Then he sliced himself open, shoved a grenade in his belly, and blew himself to bits.”