FAMINE

VIEWED THROUGH THE frosted window of the twin-engine Cessna, Jan Mayen Island appeared to Oliver Shostak as one of his favorite objects in the world, the white lace French brassiere he’d given Cassie for her thirtieth birthday. Corresponding to the cups were two symmetrical blobs, Lower Mayen and Upper Mayen, masses of mountainous terrain connected by a natural granite bridge. Raising his field glasses, he ran his gaze along the Upper Mayen coastline until he reached Eylandt Fjord, a groove so raw and ragged it suggested the aftermath of a bungled tooth extraction.

“There it is!” Oliver called above the engines’ roar. “There’s Point Luck!” he shouted, giving the bay the name by which Pembroke and Flume insisted it be called.

“Where?” asked Barclay Cabot and Winston Hawke in unison.

“There — to the east!”

“No, that’s Eylandt Fjord!” corrected the Cessna’s pilot, a weatherbeaten Trondheim native named Oswald Jorsalafar.

No, thought Oliver — Point Luck: that hallowed piece of the Pacific northwest of Midway Island where, on June 4, 1942, three American aircraft carriers had lain in wait to ambush the Japanese Imperial Navy.

He panned the field glasses back and forth. No sign of the Enterprise, but he wasn’t surprised. Only by Pembroke and Flume’s best-case scenario would they have already made the crossing from Cape Cod to the Arctic Ocean. Most likely they were still south of Greenland.

Jan Mayen’s sole airstrip lay along the eastern fringe of its only settlement, a scientific-research station grandiosely named Ibsen City. As the Cessna touched down, the prop wash set up a tornado of snow, ice, volcanic ash, and empty Frydenlund beer bottles. Oliver paid Jorsalafar, tipped him generously, and, shouldering his backpack, joined the magician and the Marxist on the cold march west.

In the pallid rays of the midnight sun, Ibsen City stood revealed as a collection of rusting Quonset huts and dilapidated clapboard houses, each set on a gravel foundation lest it sink into the illusory ground called permafrost. Reaching the central square, Oliver, Barclay, and Winston made for the Hedda Gabler Inn, a split-level motel grafted onto a tavern fashioned from a corrugated-aluminum airplane hangar. A neon sign reading SUN-DOG SALOON flashed in the tavern window, a beacon on the tundra.

The inn’s manager, Vladimir Panshin, a Russian expatriate with the raw, earthy look of a Brueghel peasant, didn’t buy the atheists’ claim to be disaffected jetsetters seeking those exotic, exciting places the travel bureaus didn’t know about. (“Whoever told you Jan Mayen is exciting,” said Panshin, “must get an orgasm from flossing his teeth.”) But ultimately his suspicions didn’t matter. He was more than happy to book the atheists into the Gabler and sell them the half pound of Gouda cheese (five American dollars), the gallon of reindeer milk (six dollars), and the dozen sticks of caribou jerky (one dollar each) they’d need for the next day’s trek.

Oliver slept badly that evening — Winston’s cyclonic snoring combined with the challenge of digesting overpriced ptarmigan stew — rousing himself the next morning only with the aid of the Gabler’s strongest coffee. At eight o’clock, Jan Mayen time, the atheists trudged past the city limits and entered the trackless tundra beyond.

After an hour’s hike they paused for lunch, spreading out their picnic on the narrow neck of rock marking the way to Upper Mayen. The cheese was moldy, the milk sour, the jerky tough and gritty. Inevitably Oliver imagined Anthony Van Horne’s cargo fashioning this particular isthmus: the gigantic hands reaching down from heaven, pinching the island in the middle. The vision alarmed and depressed him. What would the scientists back in Ibsen City do if they ever found out that their elaborate theories of uniformitarianism and plate tectonics were fundamentally meaningless? How would they react upon learning that the real answer to the geomorphic riddle was, of all things, divine intervention?

Crossing into Upper Mayen, the three men followed a pumice-covered path through the foothills of the Carolus Mountains, a journey made entertaining by a particularly dazzling performance from the aurora borealis. Had Oliver brought his art supplies along, he would have tried painting the phenomenon, laboring to capture on canvas its diaphanous arcs, ethereal swirls, and eerie crimson flickers.

At last Eylandt Fjord lay before them, a smooth expanse of steel blue water irregularly punctuated by gigantic chunks of floating pack ice. Oliver’s great fear was that the Enterprise would be delayed and they would have to camp on the tundra, so his mood brightened considerably when he saw her lying at anchor, four PBY flying boats tethered to her stern. His joy did not last.

The carrier looked old, feeble, small. She was small, he knew: smaller than the Valparaíso by half, smaller than God by a factor of twenty. The five dozen warplanes strapped to her flight deck did not seem remotely equal to the task at hand.

Barclay worked his portable semaphore, sending bursts of electric light across the fjord. G-O-D-H-E-A-D, the code name for their campaign.

The Enterprise replied: W-E-A-R-E-C-O-M-I-N-G.

The atheists scrambled down the cliff face, a treacherous descent through slippery patches of moss, jagged chunks of pumice, and a thorny, mean-spirited plant that tore their mukluks and bloodied their ankles. They reached the beach simultaneously with the carrier’s barge: a wooden inboard motorboat sporting a canvas canopy over her helm and flying a historically accurate 48-star flag. Dressed in a Memphis Belle bomber jacket, Sidney Pembroke sat on the foredeck, waving a mittened hand.

“Welcome to Point Luck!” Condensed breath gushed from Pembroke’s mouth. Even with the Arctic air flushing his cheeks, he still looked anemic. “Hop aboard, men!”

“There’s plenty of piping hot Campbell’s tomato soup back on Enterprise,” called Albert Flume, also bloodless, from behind the wheel. “Mmm, mmm, good!” He’d traded his zoot suit for the saboteur look: vicu сa vest, blue crewneck sweater, black watch cap, like Anthony Quinn in The Guns of Navarone.

Wrapping a calfskin bombardier’s glove around the throttle, Flume eased the motor into neutral. Beside him stood a granite-jawed, swag-bellied man wearing the unassuming khaki uniform of an American naval officer in the process of winning World War Two. Admirals’ stars decorated his shoulders.

Oliver waded into the shallows, wincing as the icy water gushed through the rips in his mukluks, and climbed over the transom, Barclay and Winston right behind. The Navy man ducked out from under the canopy and smiled, an unlit briar pipe clamped between his teeth.

“You must be Mr. Shostak,” said the admiral, subjecting Oliver to a strenuous handshake. “Spruance here, Ray Spruance. I use your dad’s brand of rubber all the time. Boy, I’ll bet this AIDS thing’s been a real boon to your family, right? It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good.”

Oliver grimaced and said, “These are my colleagues — Barclay Cabot, Winston Hawke.”

“Pleasure’s all mine, fellas.”

“What’s your actual name?” asked Winston, beating back a smirk.

“Doesn’t matter, Mr. Hawke. For the next two weeks, I’m Raymond A. Spruance, rear admiral, U.S. Navy, charged with the tactical side of this operation.”

“As opposed to the strategic?” asked Oliver. He was beginning to understand how these idiots thought.

“Yep. Strategy’s Admiral Nimitz, back at Pearl Harbor.”

“Where’s Nimitz really?”

“New York,” said Flume.

“We’re not paying him, are we?” asked Oliver.

“Of course we’re paying him.” Putting the motor in gear, Flume guided the barge away from the beach.

“Why are we paying him if he’s not doing anything?”