The Last Ship: A Novel

by William Brinkley

  “If Africa fails us . . .” I hesitated “. . . I haven’t decided whether to take the ship to America.”

  “America?” He looked at me as if I had taken leave of my senses; sipped his tea before speaking. “Captain, you will forgive me—that is madness. As it would be for me to make a course for my own country. In either case: It would be like stepping into a furnace.”

  I looked at him, searching his eyes. I thought I had never seen eyes so blue, honest eyes, if I could judge men. The more I had come to know him, the more I thought it just possible that we could run together. By now, the matter postponed, as noted, we had an unspoken pact not to refer again to that possibility; everything we said as though the idea of joining forces had not been discussed, was not among the available choices; inside, each never forgetting it was. For that reason alone, I think we never ceased that other and perhaps more critical matter going on below the surface of our conversation, of estimating, appraising, each the other.

  I sipped tea also. “The men may demand it.”

  The quick nod from him. Both absolutely understanding two things difficult to convey to landsmen: a captain’s vast powers; yet the extreme risks. The latter especially applying now.

  He would not ask, though it would have been obvious. But I decided, in this new burst of confession, to say it anyhow.

  “If not that, it’ll be the Pacific. By the most direct course. We have enough for that one thing. Just barely.”

  “Fuel,” he repeated, and waited. I thought for a moment the word was almost a cruel taunt, his having so much, ourselves so little. If so, the word as said seemed more than that as well; one sensed a door opening a crack. He waited, some moments now, again filled our teacups; sat back and regarded me thoughtfully.

  “Captain, have you ever heard of a place called Karsavina?”

  I knew with great intimacy the names, purposes, and resources of their bases, as well as he knew ours, particularly their bases on the northern tier, the Barents and the Siberian seas, anywhere in the region of what had been our stalking ground, in reach of the James’s own missiles. This one I did not know. I shook my head.

  “It may have been the one secret place, I mean absolutely secret.” He gave a small laugh. “Not just from you. Even from us, for whom it was meant as the last lifeline. Listen to this. . . .”

  I could hear his voice going on, something hypnotic about it, as though the words were casting a spell over me, something also nostalgic in them . . . a sailor’s tone . . .

  “I was a dozen miles off it once, not knowing then. In the Laptev Sea, making the run in summertime from Murmansk to Kamchatka. You know what was officially there? A research station for polar bears. I remembered later how you couldn’t see a thing, only a couple of small buildings on frozen tundra, summer ice. A couple of thousand miles from anything. It must have been quite an engineering feat, building that thing underground through the permafrost. Oh, yes, we didn’t steal everything, Captain,” he said slyly. “We had a few brains of our own. Then after this . . .” His hand made an odd sweeping gesture. “. . . after the missiles . . . when the pulse hit, the EMP, all contact lost . . . a sealed envelope in my cabin safe to open if that happened. Its name—its purpose. That we could replenish there.” He leaned forward on his elbows on the table so that his face was a couple of feet from mine. “A storage place for rods of highly enriched uranium fuel, Captain. It may be the only such remaining anywhere.”

  He stopped and we found ourselves looking quietly at each other in the great silence of the cabin; looking into each other’s souls. One knew without words. Some kind of underlayer of unspoken language and knowledge that had been operating between two ship’s captains, each able to see ahead to the other’s purpose, intent. Then the words themselves, but confirmatory, heard like a siren song through the tumult of thoughts welling up in me, the unspeakable implications. The words going on . . . He had a remarkably soft voice, never raised, its effect now being to make it the more insinuating, persuasive without seeming to be . . .

  “After West Africa—frankly, Captain, I don’t really expect anything there—that’s where I’m setting course. I’d be very surprised if your side ever had the idea of hitting Karsavina.” He laughed mirthlessly. “After all, your country and mine, we were able to reach an agreement to save the polar bears, if not anyone else. If it’s intact—and the odds ought to be at least even—I will pick up rods for the Pushkin to recore my reactors . . .” He was talking rapidly now, even a bit feverishly, as if on to ideas so transcendent in nature that all must give way before them . . . “I could pick up some for you. For the Nathan James.”

  He stopped again, this time with an abruptness that seemed intentional, as if to let the idea hit in as hard as possible; sipped his tea and spoke more deliberately—did I detect a certain slyness in his voice as well? “Well, now, Captain. There is no reason I could not then proceed through the Bering Strait, around Vladivostok and Kamchatka—that is to say, where they were—straight down the longitude. I’ve checked positions on the charts.” So he had prepared, none of this was impromptu as I had so naïvely judged, I thought, as what seemed like a barrage, myself all vulnerable, kept coming at me . . . “Should bring us out just about where you would be. We could . . .” He paused again, said the two words: “. . . join you. Bringing our little present for you. Some more tea?”

  That was all. I was suddenly aware as not before of the personality with which I was dealing and it seemed at once more admirable and more frightening; more complex, certainly ever so much more formidable. And yet I had no feeling that it was an overreaching personality, concerned only with greed, exclusively with self-interest. Nothing more said from across the table. No more was needed. No vulgar quid pro quo, no crass bargain. Bargain there would be if I but said the word. The thoughts, the implications once again, all of them, in all their turbulence, fled through my mind in an instant as on some fast-forward time machine, implications at once dreadful and glorious, simultaneously all-enticing and flashing the most insistent danger signal. The deal, the exchange. Participation in the settlement—including surely, in the women. I sat there stunned, trying to grasp the meaning of it.

  “That is quite an offer, Captain.” He said nothing, a man not interested in axioms, waiting in all patience for my true reply.

  During all of our passage I had not found myself full of particularly noble thoughts. My one thought rather had been to bring my ship’s company through. Nor will I attach that encomium to the thought I had then. Rather I believe it was a natural process of reasoning, of logic, of natural sequitur almost, that this thought should follow that other overwhelming idea of their actually coming in with us to make together a single community—yes, though he had said not a word as to that, nothing could have been more clear. That “responsibility” he had earlier spoken of: I wish I could say that the decision I presently reached was based on such elevated perceptions, dealing as they did with something so trans-mundane, speaking as they did of some infinite and supreme duty; that a loftier man than I might have judged as overriding even that supposedly utmost allegiance to men whose fate he had so absolutely in his hands. It was not. Oh, perhaps there was something of this: It was but natural that the only known ones left should cling to one another. Otherwise: To speak of self-interest: I was thinking only of my ship’s company, and of nuclear fuel—how it would free us from the prison, even the tomb, the death ship, that the Nathan James was soon certain to be, come forever dead in waters unknown; permit us to check out home, come back to some island then if we wished or were forced to; enable us to explore just about everywhere. There seemed no price too excessive to pay for that. Indeed it would be accurate to say that, save for that brief ferment, I was oblivious, even blinded, to what the price would be; refused to think about it in the face of such unassessable bounty. The price will lay over. Get the fuel; then deal with whatever there may be to deal with. I could think no other way.

  There was another thing. Somet
hing told me as of an absolute, something about the very essence of the man I was coming to realize I was dealing with across the table, that the deal must be made now; now or not at all. That discussion—starting with how the thing was to work—would only open the door to such vast and impervious complications, such an immensity of obstacles, even traps, in the idea as to kill it from their very weight: the deal, the offer, even withdrawn; snatched back. Once suspicion got in the door, it would corrupt the entire cabin. The idea—offer—must be taken in its purity—or refused point-blank; complex negotiations left for another time, another sea; for the reason that the offer’s essential was trust, on both sides, and without that there would be no reason to proceed in any case. Hardly realizing I was saying it, seeming as much listener to as speaker of my own words, I said:

  “Let’s do it, Captain. Yes, I’ll have some more tea.”

  What followed was simply two seamen at work in the most methodical, emotionless fashion. We might have been a couple of young navigation officers bent over a compass rose plotting the most favorable course between, say, Charleston and Bermuda. An actually enjoyable interlude, both of us natural sailors, liking hands-on work, especially the marvelous art of navigation. Teacups placed aside, charts brought out, spread, pored over; the two separate routes, for submarine and destroyer, sketched in; the most pragmatic working out of details, as to communications, as to frequencies. Even prescribed times laid on for his surfacing, raising antennae to receive, as I had seen him do two nights ago. He would report progress; as would I. My explaining to him that I intended to keep the matter secret from my ship’s company in order not to raise false hopes should he come up empty, his messages would be sent in Russian. Thurlow—whom I had brought along on some of my visits to the submarine—himself sworn to secrecy, bringing them directly to me, doing the translations. Each would keep the other informed of his position; of what he found; ourselves, if the Mediterranean yielded nothing, headed on a S. by S.E. course for the Pacific (kept submerged in my consciousness, other than that one allusion, the one great incertitude of whether ship’s company would take choice out of my hands); Pushkin, having completed the West Africa reconnoitering, setting a course N. by N. by N.E., up through the North Atlantic into the Norwegian Sea; the Barents; the East Siberian Sea—and Karsavina. Already become a hallowed word to me, I first saw the place then on the charts. It seemed in all truth a place in nowhere. Actually looking at it, it seemed the center of the universe. I was almost carried away, had to fight back the soaring emotion of the idea. Finally even working out a code word should he in fact find the nuclear fuel. It appeared a very obvious, natural choice. Turgenev.

  We talked a little more. I prepared to go; came back to civilities.

  “Captain, I want to thank you for the dental work,” I said. “Those nine men, three women—they’re enjoying life considerably more now. Oh, yes: if you can wait for our boat before casting off.”

  “Your boat?” he said, not understanding.

  “It’ll be alongside in a half hour.”

  I stood up, he with me. It came out of me, suddenly, quietly.

  “What went wrong, Captain?”

  He waited. Then a hand came up and touched my shoulder, rested there for a moment, fell away. An almost wistful smile.

  “Who was ahead of whom?”

  “It didn’t make much difference, did it?”

  “None at all.”

  He waited a moment. “Captain, together we could start the world over.”

  Cigarettes. I had discerned that this was what they missed more than anything. They were completely out. I could help but little. Cutting into our precious stores by twelve cartons—a pack for each hand aboard the sub. Our boat carrying them returned, hoisted aboard; he had blinkered his thanks as we stood away from each other, each vessel heeling gently. A rain had begun to fall and I could see his long gray shape beginning to move through the mists, the flashing light just decipherable. Then he was gone, headed around Morocco’s curve on his course down the west coast of Africa. Then over the top of the world . . . Karsavina. Then I was thinking about another Russian place-name. Orel. The crew must never know; know what a waste it was.

  As I said, other than Thurlow, I told but one officer of all this in regard to the nuclear fuel, that one sworn to secrecy. I informed Lieutenant Girard. I felt almost, as leader of the women, that she had a right to know. Otherwise I alerted Lieutenant Bainbridge, my communications officer, to the fact that we would be keeping contact with the Pushkin and gave him the frequency, doing all this in a routine matter, his patent acceptance that it was but natural that the two ships should do so; as to the Russian’s course, the cover story he and I had come up with to explain the points on his journey from which we would be hearing from him, and now passed on to Bainbridge, was that he had decided after all to take a look at his homeland. Aside from all that, the high emotion at the prospects: These I felt dampening down, perhaps my making them do so, in the more somber realization, now that I was back on the Nathan James, of the outside chance of the thing.

  Nevertheless, the deal having been made concerning a place called Karsavina . . . this, and perhaps even more, the idea of another ship out there: the world seemed a less lonely place.

  We stood east toward Suez.

  3

  The Combat Systems Officer

  Shipboard, that intact palatinate bounded so tightly by the forbidding walls of the great sea, more than most places minds can imagine things, a condition compounded in an order of magnitude by present circumstances, where even the outright hallucination is not entirely stranger to us. Nevertheless, a captain’s tendency is to err on the side of caution. There are so many necessary risks to take at sea—why take unnecessary ones? It was something I had had in mind for some time to see done, recent events somehow seeming to instill in me an urgency about it; not to put it off any longer. Propelled, I felt, into the decision by two particulars not in any way connected in my mind. One, a captain’s sense of the beginnings of a certain disquietude abroad on the ship, the possibility that it might enhance, heading in directions no one could predict in the tight world of a ship at sea, notably one in our situation. The other, something in his behavior that kept nagging at me. The last-named stimulus for the action of course never to be communicated to him by the slightest hint, a scrap of intimation. Among other reasons, that all my thoughts concerning him and that subject were imprecise as could be, conjectures as to causes and possible intent quite likely imaginary—“imaginary” things were virtually endemic in ship’s company these days, and even a ship’s captain was by no means immune, nothing in the remotest tangible to support them. Nevertheless, I would ask him—in effect order him to do it. He would not like it. When that was the case, my method had always been to make it short and sweet, to the point, a direct order.

  * * *

  He was an unlikely leader of dissenting men. Yet if it ever came, I thought, it would come from him; the only officer I in any way looked upon as dangerous: some of this deriving from the fact that, short only of the captain, he was the most powerful officer aboard. Combat systems officer. Some to that captain’s compass, that inner voice which in my years of command I had learned to listen to as to the sounds of the sea itself, in respect to a ship’s company and conditions aboard my ship; both giving off signals, scents, intimations as to imminent behavior.

  He was a man virtually without humor; rather difficult to talk with on any subject outside his field. But there, in his specialty—immensely complex, replete with consummate dangers, some esoteric in the extreme—he was an absolutely first-rate officer. I felt all the luck in the world to have him on the Nathan James. I had always given him the highest fitness reports the Navy allows, always recommending accelerated promotion. He seemed not to like or at least to enjoy people very much—not necessarily an absolutely negative trait. Perhaps as replacement, he clearly had a feeling kindred to love for the missiles, using the word in the sense applied to some men wh
o might love to a certain obsession gardening or a particular sport, extending in his case, I had sometimes felt, to harboring an almost prescriptive right to them as belonging in fee simple to himself, a touch of arrogance in his proprietorship; something I had once found vaguely disturbing, even ominous, before deciding it was but a fancy of mine, nonsense in fact, facilely interpreting a necessarily meticulous and commendable care as a somehow sinister or suspect fondness, attachment, to them. As I continued to observe Chatham at his duties, I had come full about from this view to one of being profoundly grateful that they were the direct charge of one so immersed in their behavior and every aspect, a dedication which included the resolve that their presence—sometimes they seemed like sentient members of the crew—should not be allowed to threaten others of ship’s company. In part due surely to his superlative mastery of his field, the enlisted men appeared to have a special respect for him—a common circumstance aboard men-of-war at work here, and one little known outside the seagoing world. One of the most distinguishing aspects of the shipboard life from the land life is that sailors care far less than do landsmen about the so-called “popular” aspects of the people set over them. The tradition is deep and ancient, for a reason: In the sea way, a man’s very life often depends directly on an officer’s ability, and there has never been a sailor but who, given the choice of a captain or an officer with somewhat hard-nosed “tight ship” tendencies who knows his seamanship and an excessively lenient and pleasing one who does not, will instantly choose the former. Lieutenant Commander Chatham was a superbly qualified sea officer, a natural leader of men.