The Einstein Prophecy

CHAPTER THREE

She knew that she was not supposed to be up on deck, much less in such high seas, but the air below was so fetid she couldn’t stand it anymore.

The USS Seward, with an enormous Red Cross insignia painted on its bulwarks and an additional sign displayed on its main deck for the benefit of any Luftwaffe pilots that might be passing overhead, was packed with wounded American soldiers. The Geneva Conventions barred attacks on Red Cross ships, but there was no telling which prohibitions would be observed and when. As a result, the ship was being escorted by a pair of navy destroyers. The North Atlantic was teeming with U-boats — the wolf pack, they were called — that had already sunk well over a hundred British and American vessels. Even now, one of their conning towers might be surveying this flotilla churning toward New York Harbor, and a German captain might be ordering his crew to load the torpedo bays.

Simone Rashid, swaddled in a rain slicker with the hood drawn over her hair, clutched the railing and stared out at the heaving gray waves. This whole idea — rules of war — was absurd, she thought. Men went about killing each other in the most ingenious ways they could imagine, and on a scale never before seen, but at the same time, they insisted on making up rules of engagement to preserve a facade of civilization and morality. They were like children playing a game, but one with horrendous consequences. Growing up in Cairo, she remembered her brother forming a secret club with a bunch of his friends from the King Fuad English-Speaking School, and they, too, had a long list of bylaws, rules, and regulations. The one that had rankled the most was the first one, which barred girls from joining the club. Her whole life had been a struggle against that prohibition. At the preparatory school, then Oxford, then the Egyptian Department of Cultural Affairs, she’d had to fight to prove her qualifications, to gain entry, and then, despite her exemplary scholarship, to be taken seriously.

Her youth didn’t help — she was twenty-seven, but looked even younger — nor did her beauty. Her mother had been the high-spirited, rebellious daughter of an English diplomat, and as well known for her raven tresses as she was for her scandalous behavior. Simone had inherited her looks and her temperament, along with the olive skin and dark brown eyes of her Arab father. She had taken to wearing muted colors and loose-fitting clothes to minimize the effect of her looks, but most men, she had discovered, saw through the camouflage and kept right on coming.

“You’re not authorized to be on deck, Miss,” she heard behind her, the voice nearly obliterated by the gusting wind.

She turned to see a young sailor in a green slicker reeling in a coil of wet rope. “It’s not safe,” he said.

She patted the life preserver she had strapped over her slicker to indicate she had heard, but he just shook his head. “They wouldn’t even know you’d gone overboard until it was too late.” Then, moving closer so as not to be overheard, he added, “And they probably wouldn’t turn around even if they did.”

Simone had to laugh. She knew he was right. Nothing was going to delay the progress of the Seward and its cargo of war casualties, on their way to safe haven in the United States. One young female scholar and her aged Arab father, both of whom were considered mysteries to the officers and crew, would never be of much importance. At best, they were tolerated; at worst, they were mistrusted.

An ensign, passing by, looked at her askance, then glared at the sailor. “Civilians should be belowdecks,” he barked.

The sailor kept his head down and pretended to be absorbed in stowing the rope.

“I’ve already been warned,” Simone assured him, “and I am quite capable of not falling overboard.” Her English carried the upper-crust accent of her late mother, only slightly tinged by an Arabic inflection. But this time her answer wasn’t good enough.

The ensign, feet planted wide to keep his balance on the roiling deck, said, “That’s an order from the bridge. Go below, now!”

Simone’s back went up; she didn’t like taking orders. “Why?” she said, her retort undercut by a sudden rolling of the boat that forced her to grab the railing with both hands.

The ensign smirked. “We’ve detected enemy activity, that’s why.”

Conceding defeat — reluctantly — she moved toward the hatchway, clutching the slick railing hand over hand. She could not afford to create any kind of ruckus; her very presence on the boat, like her father’s, was based on a deception. The official letters and work visas that had gotten them on board had been dummied up in her office at the Egyptian ministry. Calling any undue attention to herself could prove dangerous.

Once the door slid closed behind her, she breathed a sigh of relief — truth be told, she was getting too cold and wet to stay out there much longer anyway. She threw back the hood of her slicker. A few drops of the icy saltwater slipped under her collar, and she shivered.

Had the ensign been telling the truth about enemy activity? There was no reason to alarm her father with it either way. As she clambered down the corrugated metal stairs, the odor from the sick bays — virtually the whole ship had been converted to a floating hospital — grew worse and worse. Medics, their arms cradling plasma bags and surgical supplies, hustled past her, brushing her out of the way. Sailors made no bones about giving her the once-over. Even the shapeless slicker and life jacket were no deterrent.

The cabin Simone and her father had been assigned was, by navy standards, not bad, and as it was sufficiently high above the water line, it actually had a porthole that they could occasionally open to air the place out. When she slipped inside, she found her father exactly as she’d left him: unshaven, still in his faded silk dressing gown, perched on the edge of the bunk, and poring over tattered manuscript pages. Without even glancing up, he said, “Is it being kept safe?”

“I presume so,” she said, slipping the life jacket off and letting it drop to the floor.

“But did you see it?”

“Of course not. The cargo hold is off-limits. I was up on deck.” She stepped over a stack of books and papers, and pried open the porthole. A blast of cold, damp air blew into the cabin, swirling the papers into a tiny maelstrom.

“What are you doing?” her father exclaimed, slamming a palm down to secure the documents in his lap. “Shut that window!”

“You’re going to suffocate if you don’t let some air in here once in a while.”

“And you are going to ruin my work!”

His work. For her entire life, Simone had been hearing about her father’s work. It was what he lived for. And it was what had made his reputation. He was not only the chairman of the National Affairs Department at the University of Cairo, but the world’s leading expert on the treasures of Egyptian antiquity. In his time, he had written more books, papers, and monographs on the subject than anyone alive. But unlike most professors, he had never been content to dwell in the library archives or the museum galleries. Dr. Abdul Rashid — like his daughter, an Oxford PhD — had unearthed much of the nation’s patrimony, buried in the sands of the Sahara. The cane with the thick rubber tip resting against the edge of the bunk was a testament to the last expedition he had mounted, the one on which he and Simone had discovered the ossuary they were now secretly tracking to whatever destination its current owners — some branch of the United States Armed Forces — were transporting it.

“Do you want to go up to the canteen and have some lunch?” she asked.

“No,” he said, returning his gaze to a document written in hieroglyphics. “Just bring me back something.”

“Come with me,” she urged. “You can’t hole up in this cabin for the whole trip.”

But he had tuned her out already and was making some notation in the margin of the page with the stub of a pencil.

Simone took no offense. His manner was gruff and distant, but she knew that the bond between them was unbreakable. He had prayed for a son — what Egyptian man did not? — but then he had fallen in love with his daughter, and molded her just as he would have done a boy. Her late mother might not have approved, but then, she had not been there to influence her daughter. She had died of cancer when Simone was only ten, so instead of the parties and frivolity that her mother had once lived for, Simone had gravitated to the history and art that her father favored. Together, they would have been happy to travel back to the time of the Pharaohs.

“I’ll bring you some fruit, whatever they have,” Simone said, touching him lightly on the shoulder of his robe, “and a cup of hot coffee.”

“Tea.”

“If I can find some.” Her father still hadn’t grasped that he was on an American ship, where coffee, not tea, was the drink of choice. “Just do me one favor — shave. You look like a ruffian when you don’t.”

He grunted in acknowledgment, and Simone, still in her slicker, left the cabin. She briefly considered a detour to the cargo hold, but even if she could talk her way past the guard, what would she see? A large wooden crate with iron hasps, three padlocks the size of fists, and a bill of lading that she’d give her eyeteeth to read. She’d watched as it had been loaded on board days before.

“Look out, lady,” a sailor warned, clattering down the metal stairs with a stack of crisp white folded sheets in his arms. “Coming through!”

Simone flattened herself against the wall and stayed there as two more sailors, also burdened with bedding, barreled down after him. She could feel the ever-present vibration of the engines rumbling through the steel walls, and though the Seward had only left Le Havre two days before, she had grown so accustomed to the sound that she’d have missed it if it stopped.

Once she was sure the coast was clear, she started up the stairs again, past several areas that had been set aside for surgical procedures, where she could hear the cries of agonized soldiers going in or out of the operating bays. She continued up toward the canteen. The smell of pea soup and bologna sandwiches wafted along the corridor, but she was hungry enough that she found even these aromas tempting.

She had just loaded up a tin tray with some food, and was scanning the canteen for hot tea, when the alarms went off. A shrill blast, followed by the crackle of loudspeakers. “All hands on deck! This is not a drill!”

That damn ensign had been telling the truth. She tossed the tray into a garbage can, whipped around, and headed back toward the cabin.

“All hands on deck!”

The alarms shrieked so loudly and incessantly that she pressed her hands over her ears. The lights flickered on and off, the decks reverberated with the trampling of a thousand running feet, and the whole ship suddenly felt to Simone like a beehive that had been swatted with a stick.

Bucking the tide of sailors racing up the stairs was nearly impossible. By the time she reached their cabin, even her father had been roused to doff his dressing gown and throw on some clothes. He was holding a bulging leather valise stuffed with books and papers under his arm, and leaning on his ebony walking stick.

“What are we meant to do now?” he said, over the screaming of the siren.

“For starters,” she said, snatching a life preserver from under the cot bolted to the wall, “you can put this on!” Beyond that, even she had no idea what to do next — though she glimpsed an opportunity. “Don’t leave the cabin unless you’re instructed to. I’ll be right back!”

“No.” He clutched at the sleeve of her slicker. He always could read her mind. “You can’t go down there now. What if we’re torpedoed?”

If that happened, she thought, it wouldn’t much matter where she was. The ship would sink. “I won’t stay there any longer than I have to.”

The sirens on board the Seward had stopped, mercifully, as everyone on the ship manned his battle station. In all the commotion, she was able to race down toward the hold while everyone else was heading in the opposite direction. On the way, she had the presence of mind to snag a clipboard stuffed with papers from a hook outside an officer’s quarters, but twice, she was detained by doctors who mistook her for a nurse and tried to dragoon her into helping with the patients. Each time she broke away and continued heading down. “I’ll remember you,” the second one, wearing a badge that said DR. JAMISON, CHIEF OF SURGERY, shouted. “When this is over, I will personally make sure you get a dishonorable discharge!”

By the time Simone had made it down to the very bowels of the ship, there was only one young, and very nervous, guard still dithering in front of the hold.

“Who are you?” he said, when Simone emerged from the dimly lit corridor.

“Your relief.”

“What relief?”

“I’m in charge of the cargo manifest now,” she said, rapping the bulging clipboard. “Every sailor is needed up top, in the wards.”

“I can leave?”

She held out her hand for the keys and said, in her most authoritative voice, “You’re to report to Jamison, the chief of surgery!”

When he couldn’t unclip the key ring fast enough, Simone barked, “Get going, Sailor!”

Plopping the ring into her outstretched hand, he ran for the stairs, holding on to his hat.

The ship was putting on speed and taking a zigzag course designed to elude the torpedoes. This far below deck the air was hot and heavy, and the roar of the engines, operating at maximum power, was deafening. Overhead lights, bare bulbs behind mesh screens, flickered on and off as she made her way into the hold. Pallets of medical supplies and boxes of canned goods were lashed down with thickly braided coils of rope and stacked to the low ceiling.

Simone knew that there was other game aboard, too. There were captured Nazi armaments for study and analysis, reams of official German correspondence that had been salvaged from one overrun outpost or another, and, of course, the ossuary that she and her father had retrieved from one of the most remote and inaccessible regions of the Sahara Desert. When the German tank divisions swept through northern Africa, they had pillaged Egypt’s artifacts and selected the choicest to be sent back to the Fatherland. The US Army had somehow intercepted the ossuary — for which she would be eternally grateful — but instead of keeping it safe for eventual restoration to its rightful place in the Cairo Museum, they had put it on this ship bound for New York Harbor.

That was what Simone did not understand. Could the Allies know its secret?

For fear of that, she had tracked the progress of the sarcophagus every step of the way. As an officer in the Egyptian Department of Cultural Affairs, she had access to all sorts of internal communiqués, transfer documents, and, most important of all, underpaid, midlevel functionaries at all of the artifact’s stops along the route — functionaries who could be persuaded to part with vital information for nominal sums, or for the promise (never fulfilled) of a romantic liaison with the fetching young woman so inexplicably obsessed with one ancient casket.

If they had understood what it was, if they had been able to guess its significance and its power, they might not have been so puzzled, but Simone was not about to tell them. It had been her father’s lifework to discover the ossuary. For all that these bureaucrats knew, it was just another old stone box destined to gather dust in some museum gallery.

There was just one thing she had not yet been able to ascertain: Where was the box supposed to go after its arrival in the United States? Rather than risk losing track of it altogether, she had contrived to book passage, for herself and her father, on board this ship. Now, if the ship didn’t sink in the next few minutes, she had her best chance yet of finding out.

The ship rolled to one side, buffeted by the turbulent seas. Or was the rocking caused, she wondered, by the repercussions of depth charges exploding underwater? Discarding the clipboard, she put out a hand to steady herself and moved down the narrow aisles of supplies and matériel, scouring the work orders and delivery instructions secured in waterproof, plastic pouches affixed to their sides. She had made it to one end of the hold and was on her way back again when she noticed a khaki tarp thrown over a recessed area next to the wall. She could see a box marked “Antiseptics: USN” poking out from under one end of the tarp and had almost passed it by when something told her to take a closer look. The ship started to change direction again, throwing her off-balance, but she managed to grasp hold of the tarp’s flap and fold it back. Why did it crackle with a thin film of ice?

Below the tarp, a rectangular wooden box, bigger than a steamer trunk, was chained atop a flat steel dolly, whose own wheels were anchored to the floor. The box was well secured, but unfortunately, displayed no shipping pouch. Was that deliberate? she wondered. Throwing the tarp back even farther, she scooted around the box and saw that there was a pouch, but that it was fastened to the side closest to the wall.

In the distance, she heard muffled concussions as the depth charges went off, and then, to her horror, a much louder blast that had to have been from a torpedo meeting its mark not far away. One of their escort destroyers had surely been hit.

But would the U-boats respect the Red Cross insignia the Seward was sailing under? For that matter, had they even seen it?

There was no time to lose. As soon as the ship had completed yet another juddering turn, Simone squeezed between the wall and the wooden box. Though she had seen plenty of cargo pouches in her career, even in the feeble light of the hold, she recognized that this one was different. This one bore the stamp of the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, DC, along with a warning — in big red block letters — that the crate was of “Priority A-1” importance, and should be handled with “all caution, care, and deliberation.”

More problematic was the fact that the packet had been sealed, tacked, then duct-taped to the crate. If she planned to open it without anyone finding out, she would have to peel the tape back with her fingernails, then pray she could seal it up again perfectly. She was working at one end of the tape, and had already broken two nails in the process, when the ship suddenly bucked, as if a mighty fist had punched its hull, then listed to one side. Boxes that hadn’t been properly secured toppled over, the tinkle of glass beakers breaking inside.

Simone’s back was pressed between the wall and the heavy crate, which threatened to slip its moorings and crush her. The wall was cold, but the box, strangely enough, seemed even colder; she could see her breath fogging the air as it loomed above her, and she could hear the ominous sound of water — rushing water — entering the boat.

So much for the protection of the Red Cross markers.

Where, she wondered, had the torpedo hit? And could a ship like this survive it? Pinned between the wall and the crate, she could smell a salty tang in the air. As she tried to extricate herself, it felt almost as if the damn box were trying to seize her, and she tore her slicker on the corner of the crate, breaking free. Lurching to the steel gate of the hold, she heard the shouts of sailors clambering down to the engine rooms, and the rumble of giant pumps engaging. She locked the hold behind her, hooked the key ring to its handle, and as she ran toward the stairs to rescue her father, she noticed that she was splashing through a thin rivulet of water.

A rivulet that grew deeper with each step, until it was up to her ankles by the time she hit the stairs.

She struggled to make it back to the cabin, out of breath and soaked to the knees, only to find the door swinging open on its hinges.

And her father not inside.

He could only have gone up; otherwise, she’d have passed him on her way back from the hold.

She raced for the stairs, going up and around until she reached the hatchway, slid the door back, and took one small step out onto the deck.

The afternoon sun was hidden behind a bank of scudding dark clouds, and a pall of black smoke was drifting toward the Seward. Shielding her eyes, she could see that the smoke was emanating from the Van Buren, one of the escort destroyers, maybe half a mile off. An orange fire licked at one of its gun batteries. A slick of something glistened on the churning gray waves. The wind stank of burning oil.

But there was no sign of her father.

The Seward was plowing ahead, heaving through the turbulent seas, and she had to put out both arms to brace herself. Her eyes smarted from the smoke and the salt spray. The ensign who had crossed her earlier ran past, but not before spotting her again and cursing, “Get the hell off the deck!”

She shouted, “Have you seen my father?”

The ensign was already past her, dashing toward the bridge, when the ship suddenly teetered, bow down, on the crest of a massive wave. Simone saw the ensign, flat on his back, sliding headlong down the deck. Letting go of the handrail with one hand, she reached out and grasped one of his flailing arms, arresting his fall — until the ship dropped like a stone into a great gray trough, groaning and creaking and tilting to starboard. A freezing wave swept over the bulwarks. Her arm felt like it was about to pop out of its shoulder socket, but she held on tight, praying all the while that her father was all right, and that the ship would be able to stay afloat long enough to limp into some port.

A second later, the Seward shuddered from the force of something erupting beneath its hull. The entire ship rose up, as if lifted by Neptune himself, into a spume of seawater and a cloud of choking black smoke.