The Last Ship: A Novel

by William Brinkley

  “Listen to me. Listen well. Desperate now? I have to tell you that it can be far more so.”

  The tense stillness returned—men wary, but waiting, watching me with the eyes of lookouts; many—what number there was no way of telling—adversarial not to me, I felt, but to the news I brought; aware that the two could merge swiftly, indiscernibly, into a single hostile force. I spoke as though to each individually; no more loudly than before; but each sentence, each word, clear and hard as bullets aimed, in my own desperation, at a target I must not miss: their reason.

  “At present we have the ship. The ship is the only home we’ve got and there is no other in sight; you have seen, all of you, what it is like on the beaches. But we will not always have the ship. When the fuel goes, she goes. And when the ship is gone, we will have no home. We have got to use the ship while we have her, while she can get us around. We have an amount of food. Neither is it unlimited. When the fuel is gone and the food is gone and we are still on the seas, having found nothing . . . We must not let that happen. We must use them both to one purpose: to find some place that will take us in. Otherwise we will simply come dead in the water one day; food running out; marooned on the sea. You know all of these things. Why have you forgotten them?”

  I stopped. I had spoken with every intent of shocking them into their senses. That same intolerable silence again. Then a voice.

  “I’m with the captain there. We can’t afford sightseeing.”

  “Sightseeing?” The word came instantly back from somewhere. “You call it sightseeing to check out how things are . . . home? Well, by God. All these secondhand reports. Do we know?”

  It came like a flash fire. I could only think: The men must not be set against one another. It was time to shut this down.

  I spoke into the tenseness, in tones of reassurance.

  “Shipmates,” I said, “let us take an even strain. We are far from being without hope. The same fact of this ship beneath us: We have every right to think in terms of fair prospects. I have not decided against going home. I haven’t decided our course at all. It is too early to do so. That land you see beyond the bow . . .” My head turned toward the line of the African continent. “We have not even begun to explore it. It may offer us a place, a habitable place, where we can dig in for a while, wait, perhaps in time hear directly from home . . .” I felt I was coming close to the line of offering too much, drew back from it . . . “If neither of these happens, when we reach Suez we will take a new look. Above all, we will not lose hope. There is no reason to do so. Hope—and fortitude . . . they will see us through.”

  I paused a few seconds, looking at them, they at me, in the great silence, broken only by the soft wash of the sea against the ship. I did it quickly. Feeling that the very fact of their staying assembled like this together would touch off something. I told them of the Russian submarine’s proposals that we join forces, go in company, that I had not decided as to it. And wanting, I think, to leave them with a little shock, added, a bit brutally: “By the way. The Russians are not going home. They have the sense to know they cannot. Just something for you to be thinking about. That is all. Let us stand down for now. Ship’s company dismissed.”

  For a moment they remained where they were; then began, with infinite slowness, as of men unresolved, men full of immense, all-baffling quandary, to disperse. As I stepped down from the launcher and started through them, I heard a low voice: “Why can’t we take a vote on it?” I snapped around; a movement purely reflexive. Only silence. I was on the point of asking who had said that; realizing that was the worst thing I could do; dangerous at that moment even to challenge it; turning back, continued on. The men broke ranks to let their captain through. As I passed through them, it was as though on a swelling of silent murmurings, things unspoken but heard, as of a ghost wind, itself mute but audible as are all winds, beginning to freshen ominously through the ship’s stilled halyards; certifying one thing only in its discrete and unmistakable texture, its sole scent, indigenous, detectable by any sea captain, none so dread to a ship off soundings; combining with it a thought that brought the mind hard and still: that last voice was the same as before.

  * * *

  The sea keeping to its sacramental stillness under skies unstirred by a breath of wind, I stood on the starboard bridge wing in the lateness of night, watching her across the water, her huge length silhouetted under pale stars against the western horizon. Somehow the sea seemed less lonely, the darkness itself less solipsistic, with her sitting there, a live ship, with 112 well and breathing souls in her; seeming in the night’s great peace that held everywhere more reassurance than threat; comforting, the nearness of fellow sailors. Seamen, I thought, are closer than nationalities. As if in validation, the yellow beacon of surfaced submarines in peacetime struck brightly from her sail area, one flash per second for three seconds, followed by a three-second off period, harmonic as a chord of music, endlessly repeating itself, the long spectral pattern of illumination piercing far into the night and across the five miles of water between us; striking us rhythmically in a contact itself of amicable nature, so intended, I felt, nothing requiring him to comply. Just above me, our communications sweep antennas on the mainmast: suddenly I was aware of it; looked up. I looked back at Pushkin across the water. A small doubt infiltrated. Why had he been able to raise people, ourselves not? If anything our own communications gear was more sophisticated than his, though it was true he had special devices installed in submarines with their greater difficulty in that area. When I had asked to listen in on his equipment, he had said that the messages came no more, not from anywhere, and seeing my skepticism led me then to his communications room—where operators always on duty, as on our ship, tried every frequency for me without result; myself listening in with spare earphones all the while. Idly now I trained my nightscope on her during the beacon’s three-second off periods. Nothing. Then as I watched, I saw his antenna mast rise, startling me: something normally done by a submarine when some prearranged communication is to be made. It did not in itself mean that: He might simply be undertaking some general effort to raise others, quite as we did endlessly ourselves. Nevertheless, remembering his noting that all returns had long ceased, suspicion set in. It seemed possible even that the beacon flashes which I had judged turned on as a friendly act might have been meant instead to obscure the raising of the antenna—it was only by chance, and with the aid of the powerful starlight scope, that I had picked up the movement in one of the three-second off interims. I looked at my watch—was further disturbed to see its hands just passing straight up 2300; exactly. It was not unusual for such efforts as between two distant parties to be laid on at a precise on-the-even-hour. Thoughts tumbled in on me: Was Chatham right all along; something up his sleeve, as he put it? I could not believe it, having talked with the man. I did not like to believe I could be conned, and certainly not now, not on this; least of all by another ship’s captain. Nevertheless I would ask him about that antenna mast: I would want an explanation.

  Whether or not brought on by these misgivings, some sort of falsehood, surreptitiousness, some kind of duplicity at work, seemed to stain the pure sea air; the sense of danger about; a foreboding felt, untraceable as to source, as I continued to study the long shape across the water. Treachery? Always a possibility. By nature sailors trusted; by compensation, a sense of smell for true danger to themselves and their ship, whether from the sea or otherwise, was given to them highly astute. Accordingly I set about calmly, methodically, to think it through.

  If we should go in company with him, and if the time, God stay it, should arrive that we came hove-to in the water, all engines stopped forever: at that point we would appear to be at his mercy. He would have under him a fueled, navigating ship; ourselves sitting aboard a dead one. He could refuse to take us aboard—yes, it was my intention that he do that, if matters so evolved; could simply leave us, make for the horizon; abandon us to our fate. I did not think he would do so. First, because
I didn’t believe he had that kind of surprise in mind; trust. One seaman’s trust of another. Second: if the thought should occur to him I didn’t imagine he had any great wish for his crew to starve. By that time he would be living off our food supplies. Coming down to this: each of us with a club held over the other: his, fuel; ours, food. I liked that. In an unknown situation it was always pleasant, a source of comfort, to have trust backed up by a good strong heavy weapon, the more lethal the better; it would be difficult to imagine a more effective one in that category than food. The mind gave up its conclusion: We could run safe with him. Mind, not quite resting, worked on a bit: presented another element to reassure: that other thing that had seemed to, well, almost stop the Russian in our dialogue—the moment it had come out, quite parenthetically, that we had women aboard, members of ship’s company; his look of astonishment supplanted by a kind of wonder, a mixture on his face of awe and calculation, or so I judged it. His desire for our joining forces, going together, seeming then to me subtly to augment. It was at that point, without directly connecting the two, that he had mentioned it. I tried now to reproduce in my mind his precise language, this, I think: “Isn’t that our chief responsibility, Captain? Isn’t anything else trivial by comparison?” What a curious word it had seemed for him to use. “Responsibility.” Then I thought: It was not strange that it should have been Girard who alone among the officers appeared to have got it: being not just a naval officer; being also a woman. The thing might appear too shadowy in the entire; but as I shut it down, leaving it in the penumbra in which it dwelled, it somehow seemed finally to lay treachery at rest.

  These matters then passed and I had stood rather in peace, the healing power of the sea reaching in to me; the stars appearing exceptionally bright and wondrous, in their great multitudes filling clean skies; looking up now and then to study a constellation, check its position with a navigator’s eye, a gesture always remedial; when that other long-familiar thing said it was now its turn, rose from that deep inside where I habitually kept it under the most infrangible of seals, breaking with all ease through these defenses to make one of its periodic visits; myself never knowing when that would be, its coming at me at times of its own choosing, whim, with no decipherable schedule. I looked far out across the dark plain of the sea. One sometimes felt madness like a shadow stalking one. One felt one had a different mind now from the one that had accompanied oneself through life; it spoke to me now, in all temptation. The earth simply could not be empty out there, beyond those horizons; some vast mix-up, collusion even, in all the reports; perhaps we should go home; find out. I realized with a shock that I was beginning myself to doubt the evidence; stepped back in horror from the thought. I felt an actual physical dizziness, as though teetering on the utmost edge of the abyss; looked over the bridge wing shield, straight down at the sea; there was the abyss. To just slip into it—the sea would probably throw back in rage any sailor who tried that. Certainly a ship’s captain. With a sudden spasm of the body as from some unspeakable cowardice, I came back from it, slamming, as by an actual violent physical movement, the demon once again back into that quarantine from which he had for a moment escaped; came back for my soul’s sake—for the souls of my ship’s company, given everlastingly into my hands. I realized I was breathing hard; reached up and felt sweat on my brow in the cool night. Then all came calm again. Sanity speaking, its clear intent to put a little spine into me, who had blabbered of fortitude, to face the one question I knew to be free of all imaginings, as real as the sea all around me, as the stars above: Will ship’s company not let their captain take the ship and them anywhere but home? Aware that my captaincy hung in the balance.

  2

  Turgenev

  We had reached, after more exchange visits, his coming to the James, my going to Pushkin, an agreement that cleverly—on both our parts, I felt, each captain precisely aware of what the other was up to, the object of each being identical, never saying so—postponed the question of whether we should join forces, go together, with an immediate plan of operations that seemed to both of us prudent in itself. He would explore the west coast of Africa. We would reconnoiter the north coast (as we had intended, in any case). Keeping in communication on an arranged frequency; if either found a habitable place, he would so inform the other; though no commitments as to merging forces made even so, this topmost matter deliberately left in suspension, unresolved. And during the exchanges, one great gift he had brought me. Suez was open. It was a stunning piece of news. I pressed him.

  “There must be no mistake about this,” I said. “We are low on fuel. It could greatly affect our course.”

  “We went ourselves to its mouth.” He shrugged, utterly nonchalant. “Obviously for some reason our side wanted to spare it. Your side wanted to spare it.” I thought: “Sides.” He shrugged again. “More likely, just that there was no particular reason to take it out.” He gave a sardonic grin. “Of course, they could just have overlooked it on the list—it was a pretty long list.”

  Whatever the reason, it was an incandescently precious bit of knowledge I hoarded in my innermost heart.

  Otherwise: I was satisfied with this arrangement. It felt right. So were my officers when I presented it to them—even Lieutenant Commander Chatham. Nothing could be lost by it. It would give us time to decide as to the larger matter. One was nagged by amorphous feelings, making for irresolution. As if we were missing some element, so far elusive, needed to make the final decision. The interlude, besides allowing time to appraise and reflect, seemed also to offer an opportunity to test the Russian’s bona fides: constituted somehow in his mission to West Africa. Surely on his part for him to test ours as well; none of this voiced, the negotiations being conducted on both sides with a subtlety, an obliqueness, that would have done honor to the Jesuit; but unmistakably understood by both of us. Chatham, while concurring, had by no means sanctified the Russians: “Captain, he may follow us clandestinely. We know the Russians had got pretty far up the road to perfecting a silent propulsion system.” He had a point. Still, I had sighed. “We’ll see, Mr. Chatham. We’ll see. I have great faith in our sonar gear—I always felt we stayed a step ahead of their progress in that respect.” Thurlow, at the mention of this at the officers’ meeting, had suggested lightly that as a protection against such deception, Chatham be assigned liaison duty in the submarine. The combat systems officer was not amused. At all events it was a decision that seemed right, as I have said, so felt by all; leaving as it did all options as to any kind of conjunction open as could be.

  Then, on my last visit, meant as a courtesy call more than anything, we reached, almost fortuitously, it seemed at the time, almost by a chance remark of his which he might very well not have made, another arrangement which embodied commitment, however dependent on an eventuality which I felt remote, certainly more remote than did he; which contained, in fact, the seed for changing everything and which I chose to keep secret from all of my officers save two; in part because of the long odds as I saw them; more important, because I felt even its possibility might weigh too heavily in our decision of where to go; distort, perhaps even lead to the wrong decision. Fortuitously, I said. Later I was to think there was nothing of chance to it, that he had shrewdly planned it, perhaps from the beginning, or more likely from the first moment of learning the distinct nature of the ship’s company of the Nathan James; the very fact of saving it until the last, springing it, seeming to validate this notion.

  Before that I had had something of my own to get out of the way and came right to it. We were alone in his cabin, having a farewell cup of that excellent tea of theirs. I looked very carefully at him. Then sprang it myself, watching his eyes as I did.

  “Captain, what was your antenna doing being raised at twenty-three hundred two nights ago?”

  There was no change at all in his expression. “We were running a drill,” he said.

  “Oh, I see. Good to keep the crew on their toes, isn’t it?”

  “I f
ind it so.”

  He refilled teacups from a pot on the small table. I started to . . . then thought no. Give him any benefit of doubt on this one. It was not the time to question his word. Certainly not on such scant evidence, little more than suspicion; don’t back him into a corner. We came away from it, relaxing a bit. Matters then suddenly quiet, the bond of the sea seeming to bring us together; beyond that, that special and peculiar affinity between ship’s captains, of whatever nationality, all beset by the loneliness of command, none able to talk with unfettered fullness to anyone on his own ship; infinitely rewarding, a treasure often sought out when available, ships in port, to speak freely with one in the identical circumstance, under the identical burden; and now many other unvoiced things as well binding us, the chief of these being: how many of us remained, anywhere? We both spoke quietly, without constraint.

  “Where is your home, Captain?”

  “Insofar as I have one—Charleston, South Carolina.”

  He smiled softly. “I’ve seen it—through a periscope.”

  “Yours?”

  “A place called Orel. You probably never heard of it.”

  My heart skipped a beat.

  “Wasn’t it Turgenev’s home?”

  “Why, yes,” he said, the note of surprise, not, patently, that I had read Turgenev but that I knew of these origins.

  For a moment I thought I might. I was too cowardly. I sipped my tea.

  “In addition to Turgenev I believe you had a few SS-18 silos there.”

  “True. Until last November. They were moved.”

  Perhaps—who can say as to these things? . . . perhaps even that . . . surprise . . . was to lead in some way not immediately apparent to what followed; who can ever know what will be a catalytic agent to the unexpected, trigger the otherwise not-to-be? For the moment I was concerned only with, yes, personal control of myself. I looked at my hand on the teacup. I was afraid to lift the cup; afraid fingers would tremble. An actual dizziness seized me. I knew only that I must get away from it. Maybe that realization leading to the next thought and it leading in turn in its mysterious and circuitous way to his proposal. I cannot say. In any event, almost desperate to remove myself from the trap that had suddenly reached out for me, mind said: Why not that? Why not say to him, a fellow captain, what I could not say to a soul aboard my own ship; unburdening itself can clear the undecided mind for action, and a rare opportunity for that luxury sat before me.