CHAPTER 113

Thomas and Kumi huddled together beside Jim, as Hayes prowled around toward the shore, his eyes on them, a lion selecting a young or wounded gazelle from the pack.

“God,” Jim whispered.

Thomas took it for a prayer, but something in the tension of Kumi’s grip opened his eyes. The water, the eerily red water that Thomas had first seen on the Paestum grave painting, was stirring, but not with waves. There were creatures in the surf behind Hayes, and they were coming ashore.

It’s the red tide. They’ve come to feed.

Instinctively he took a step backward, and Kumi moved with him. Jim struggled to his feet and followed suit.

“Where do you think you’re going?” said Hayes, and his coolness was now underscored by a certain pleasure that might have been righteousness. He cocked the machine gun and aimed.

“You say I believe in nothing,” said Thomas suddenly, his eyes meeting Hayes’s and holding them. “But that isn’t true. I believe in complexity and intellect, in reason and tolerance. I believe in the spirit and in matter, and I believe that all these things are the gifts of a God who does not want faith over thought, or moralism over compassion. I believe, as my brother did, that God’s creation is ongoing, evolving, according to the laws of a universe He devised.”

Hayes stared at him, the weapon level, arrested by what he had heard, somehow unaware of the way they shrank away from him and from the shore at his back. Then he sneered, and his finger began to tighten on the trigger till something in their faces stopped him and he half turned.

The first creature out of the waves was eight feet long and a quarter of that was jaws. The second was bigger. It was the third that took him down.

Hayes sensed the movement and swung the gun behind him, opening fire, but they were all around him, and by the time one of them was whipping back and forth in its death agony, another had already lunged with its great crocodile maw, a surprisingly high and powerful strike driven by the tail, that brought it up as high as Hayes’s chest. It seized him around the middle and slammed him into the sand. The second then grabbed his foot as he writhed and screamed and kicked, dragging him back into the bloody water. A fourth went for his throat, and with one last gurgling cry, he went quiet.

“The GPS marker!” shouted Kumi.

Thomas started forward, snatching for the gun as the fishapods lashed around his ankles.

One of the creatures had clamped hold of Hayes’s left arm. With a lurching stride and swish of its muscular tail, the beast pushed back into the water and began to spin. The arm tore from its socket. Then another of the fish lurched into the fray, tugging at the severed limb. The first attacker adjusted its grip and pulled, and the hand came away with part of the forearm. Thomas reached into the scarlet foam, grabbed the freed GPS unit, and hopped away as one of the creatures wheeled and snapped at him, getting enough height to seize him by the shoulder.

Thomas fell back, clutching the transmitter, scrambling crablike up the beach.

“Now what?” he said.

“The drone will hit the Nara,” said Kumi, “and we have no way of warning them.”

“Give me that,” said Jim, seizing the GPS unit with its pulse monitor. “How long do you think it has to be off before the plane recalculates its target?”

“I would have thought it was instantaneous,” said Thomas, still watching the swirling mass of primitive creatures as they tore at Hayes’s corpse.

“No,” said Kumi. “Pulse is erratic. The system must accommodate irregularity and momentary disconnection. Why?”

Jim looked up and grinned, waggling one hand. He had fastened the pulse monitor to his own wrist.

“Even if that works,” said Thomas. “How does it help? It just means that we are the target again instead of the boat.”

“Me,” said Jim. “You can still go. Take the lifeboat and make for the Nara. Now.”

Thomas stared at him. “You’re kidding,” he said. “I’m not leaving you now.”

“I probably wouldn’t make it anyway,” said Jim, considering his bandages. “This way at least I die with purpose.”

Thomas just looked at him. Around them the wind pulsed and the trees beyond the beach swayed, sighing.

“No way,” said Thomas. “Kumi. Say something . . . Kumi?”

But Kumi was crying, stooping to Jim, embracing him, clinging to him.

“See,” said Jim to Thomas. “She gets it. Why are you always the last to figure things out?”

“This is crazy,” Thomas roared.

“No,” said Jim. “It’s self-sacrifice. Not the same thing. Greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for his friends. Remember?”

“No,” said Thomas, defiant still. “That’s nuts. I won’t let you.”

“Are you my friends?” said Jim.

Kumi sobbed and hugged him tighter. Thomas stood quite still for a second and then nodded once.

“Well, then,” said Jim, smiling, “you’d better go. And Thomas?”

“Yes, Jim?”

“Did you believe what you said to Hayes just now, about spirit and matter and compassion? Did you believe that or was it just a way of keeping his attention off the sea?”

For a moment Thomas just stood there, barely able to remember what had just happened, what he had just said.

“Both,” he said. “I think.”

Jim smiled and nodded thoughtfully. “Good enough,” he said.

Thomas was still rooted to the spot. “I . . . I’m sorry I doubted you,” he said, his voice binding in his throat.

“Doubt is integral to faith,” said Jim. “Without it . . .”

He shrugged and opened his hands.

Nothing.

But . . .” Thomas tried.

“Go,” said Jim, more urgent this time. “Now. Or it’s all a waste.”

Thomas reached a hand for Kumi’s shoulder, but she shrugged him off, sobbing louder than ever.

“It’s okay,” said Jim, whispering into her ear. “Better this way. Clear, you know?”

And finally, she released him. Thomas led her away, half-blinded by his own tears as they ran across the beach to the lifeboat.

 
 
Jim watched them all the way to the boat and then looked back to the GPS unit on his wrist. There was a green blinking light that, he hoped, meant that the switch had not been detected. He was tired and in pain, but he couldn’t quite shake the sadness of leaving the world. He recalled Christ in Gethsamane, waiting to be arrested, and praying, “Father, if this cup might pass from me . . . But Your will be done.”

He considered the beach, the palms, the soft, refreshing morning breeze that had carried the voice of God to Elijah.

There were worse places to die.

Amazingly, the ikthus fish that Hayes had drawn in the sand had survived the chaos of the final battle. Jim reached over and, watching the beasts at the shoreline, drew two sets of legs beneath it. He considered the image, thinking of Ed, and added a cross for an eye.

Jim watched Thomas and Kumi driving the rowboat away from the shore, unmolested by the strange creatures on the beach, and raised his eyes to the horizon. Almost beyond the range of sight a slender aircraft with a bulbous nose and long, fragile wings was descending. It closed fast, and he watched its course, bearing in mind the Nara with its crew and the rowboat with his friends, holding his breath, waiting for the switch in approach that never came. It flew with purpose, gracefully, less like a hawk than a dove, swooping.

He gathered himself to his knees, wincing at the pain in his side and prayed in the words of the De Profundis: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord, Lord, hear my voice. O let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleading . . .”

The plane seemed to accelerate as it closed, dropping still further. Then came a flare of light from the pylons beneath its wings, and smoke billowed from the rockets as they sped toward him.

“. . . Because with the Lord there is mercy and fullness of redemption,” said Jim, eyes closed, as the missiles rained down around him.