Paul Christopher - The Lucifer Gospel

“Getting bad,” Hilts commented, trying to pull and glide his way to the entrance. He finally reached it. Finn came in behind and above, hanging on to the upper edge of the broad hatch in the side of the ship. Outside the sea had darkened perceptibly, the sun from above cut by at least half. The strength of the tidal surge plucked at their buoyancy vests, the harsh current moving first in one direction, then rebounding to the other. There was roughly a ten-second pause of relative calm between them. “We’ll have to time it exactly right if we want to get back to the anchor line in one piece,” instructed Hilts. The line was snugged around the lifeboat davit four decks up. If they missed the calm between the surge and its backwash they’d either be slammed mercilessly against the hull or swept out into the channel. Finn had always been curious about traveling to Cuba, but not enough to be a waterlogged corpse washed up on one of her white sand beaches.

“What about a safety line?” Finn suggested.

Hilts shook his head. “Too much drag. It would slow you down. Just wait for the pause and then swim like hell. If you feel the return stroke coming, find something to hang on to, quick, got it?”

“Got it.”

They waited in the entranceway as the surge poured in through the opening, sweeping them back. As it faded Hilts hit the green full buoyancy button on his vest and shot out through the hole, rising quickly out of sight. Hilts counted to herself. At ten she tensed and waited. The surge came again, passed through, heading for the wall of the reef, and then the movement stilled again. Finn hit the green button on her own vest, kicked hard and rose up through the water, watching for Hilts’s waiting figure by the anchor line. She decided on her way up the huge, curving side of the hull that if he wasn’t there she’d simply keep on going up to the surface and pray she’d arrive within a reasonable distance from the inflatable. She tried not to think of the hundred other possibilities, none of them good.

She kept her mask up as she slipped up the barnacle-and-coral-encrusted side of the ship, keeping herself well off, trying to judge the strength of the surging current at her back, wondering if she had enough time left before it smashed her against the hull. With her vest at full rise, the shells and fire coral with its poisonous, jellyfish stingers and its spiky exoskeleton would tear her to ribbons. Suddenly the line of the open deck appeared and there was Hilts, hand out to grab her just as the surge hit, pushing them both hard. Finn managed to weather the beating of the surge using her free hand to hang on to the anchor line and then it was momentarily calm again.

“I didn’t think I was going to make it,” she said, her breath coming harshly.

“I was having my doubts there for a second as well,” Hilts replied, the sound of his voice crackling and breaking up in her ear with a hiss. “And we’re not out of it yet.” He let go of the line with one hand and pointed upward. Finn stared. Fifty feet above them the water was in a torn fury, the vortices of the waves smashing in all directions, filling the water with bubbling turbidity. Finn knew the surface was quickly turning into a nightmare. The approaching storm was almost upon them; they had to reach shelter soon or they’d be in very bad trouble.

“We’ve got to get topside-now,” she said.

“No argument from me,” agreed Hilts. “Let’s go.”

They waited for the next surge to pass then followed the line up to the top, hanging on with one hand and guiding their progress with the other. Amazingly the inflatable had ridden out the rising weather and hadn’t swamped. Finn’s head broke the surface and she saw that things were worse than she’d thought. Through the beaded water on her face mask she could make out the far horizon. It was a black horror of scudding clouds that seemed to rise up like a terrible wall. They’d surfaced in the middle of a raging, moaning gale, and from the looks of the horizon the gale was only a taste of much worse to come. She tugged the mask up and over her face as Hilts reached the surface beside her. Both of them clung to the dangling side ropes of the dinghy as the cold rain lashed at them with talons of icy spray. Suddenly, impossibly, there was the sound of a bullhorn close by. They turned toward the sound and stared in disbelief.

It was Rolf Adamson, fifty yards away, standing spread-legged on the corkscrewing rear deck of a Viking 56 supercruiser yacht with the name Romans XII across the transom. He had the bullhorn in one hand and a pump-action shotgun dangling from the other. “Mr. Hilts, Miss Ryan! Please! You must come out of there instantly, I insist! You’ll catch a chill if you’re not careful!”

A damson was dressed in white duck trousers, a blue denim shirt, and black Topsiders without socks. He sat on the far side of the boat’s large and lavishly decorated salon in one of the big tan leather club chairs scattered around, a cut crystal tumbler full of single-malt whiskey in one hand and the Lucifer medallion in the other. Beside him, in jeans and a Harvard sweatshirt, was Jean-Baptiste Laval, the supposed expert in Coptic inscriptions. Finn and Hilts, dressed in long fluffy bathrobes with Romans XII embroidered across the right chest, sat together on one of the long low leather couches arranged around the bulkheads. Adamson gestured at the bathrobes with the hand holding the medalion. “You understand the significance of the name, don’t you?” he asked.

Finn spoke before Hilts had time to open his mouth. “Of course,” she said mildly. “It’s from the Bible. Romans twelve, verse nineteen. Vengeance is Mine sayeth the Lord.”

Adamson was impressed. “Very good, Miss Ryan. I had no idea you came from such a religious family.”

“I didn’t. Just a reasonably literate one,” said Finn.

“It’s actually Romans XII the second, to be really accurate,” Adamson said and smiled. “My grandfather owned the first one. A Boeing fifty-foot Bridgedeck. He used to come out to Cay Sal Bank with Joe Kennedy and Cardinal Spellman to bonefish before they went on to Havana.”

“Your grandfather. This would be Schuyler Grand, the wacko radio evangelist?” asked Hilts. Finn wondered how smart it was to overtly provoke a man with a shotgun up against his chair.

“That’s correct, Mr. Hilts.”

“Doesn’t sound like the Schuyler Grand I knew,” the photographer answered.

“That’s the point, Mr. Hilts, you didn’t know him. Few did. He was a very complicated man.”

“He was crazy,” said Hilts flatly.

“He certainly was.” Adamson smiled. “He was crazy as a bedbug, but there was nothing crazy about his patriotism. He believed that America was the greatest nation in the world and that it had been created to lead the rest of the planet away from godless communism and into the light of true democracy.”

“That story’s a little out of date,” said Hilts. “All the people who sang that tune are dead and gone, from Stalin all the way down to Richard Nixon.”

“The names have changed but the enemies haven’t,” Adamson answered. “America is faltering once again and it needs a strong patriotic leader to save it. A man of God. A man for God.”

“Why do I get the idea that man is you?” said Hilts sourly.

“Do you know what a killer culture is, Mr. Hilts, Miss Ryan?”

“Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun. Barbarism as a culture,” offered Finn.

“Osama bin Laden,” said Hilts.

“Most people find the idea abhorrent. They think that a barbarian is simply someone who hasn’t seen the light. But that’s not the case. There are killer cultures all around us but we’re too vain, or isolationist in our thinking, to believe it. There is no way that Islam and Christianity can ever coexist. We are both killer cultures. Cultures who kill their enemies as a way of life. Hitler knew that, but his vision was too shortsighted. If he’d made war only on his true enemy-Communism-he would have captured half the world and lived to a ripe old age. The Prophet said to ‘make slaughter’ on the Infidel and Christian dogma tells us to ’smite the anti-Christ.’ There can be no middle ground. This is a crusade. One way of thinking must win in the end. And we’re losing, except we refuse to recognize that fact. We no longer have the highest standard of living in the world. Workers in Canada and places like Brunei earn better wages. Korea has better longevity statistics. Cuba’s population is more literate. Progress has been turned into a dirty word and our president would rather see us as asexual Puritans. We have turned ourselves into a nation of scapegoat seekers who look for their cultural pleasure in reality shows that are anything but. I intend to put a stop to that and the Lucifer Gospel will help me do it.”