The afternoon did much to make the cares and concerns that were always with us recede if only for a few hours. The happy shouts of sailors disporting themselves filled the air, joyous yelps ringing out from the water and from the touch-football contest. The final score was an arguable thing, each side claiming the higher figure. It was near 1800 and I was engaged in the dilatory and soothing occupation of observing that remarkable display—one would go far to see it, for it is one of nature’s most sublime profferings—of a huge scarlet sun preparing to set half over sea and half over desert when Lieutenant (jg) Selmon approached me and abruptly said it was time to go. I was startled at how quickly the time had slipped away, and had almost forgotten that there was someone like Selmon around to tell us when we had to break off. “Captain, it’s time” was the phrase he had some time back settled on and employed now. It was as though he were some sort of plenipotentiary timekeeper from whose calls there was no appeal.
We started embarking in the boats to head out for the ship standing about a thousand yards offshore. I was thinking, with gratitude, how the faces of ship’s company appeared more relaxed than I had seen them in some time. How little it took! How little really sailors asked! How little complained when compared with so many of the whining human race. I felt again in me that surge of affection, shielding, paternal. I was waiting to go in the last boat off the beach when I became aware of the imposing figure of Preston, the huge boatswain’s mate, coming toward me. He was wearing cut-off dungarees and nothing else.
Now he stopped and just stood there in a strange silence. Then he said the name once, just that, nothing more, in that quiet, clear-toned voice of his which seemed less a contrast than a complement to his physical impressiveness, as if loudness were always unnecessary and inherently vulgar. Then said it again. I looked beyond him. The sea-desert sunset was commencing its daily act of farewell. Solarly speaking, it would have to be the right time of year to witness that feat and as I watched I was thinking that it was a fine gift, a blessing, perhaps even a favorable omen, that we just happened to have put in here at the right time.
“Yes? What about him?”
“I can’t find him, Captain.”
Instantly, somehow, I thought back on my recent conversation with him when, in the course of my late-hours prowling of the ship, I came across his lone figure standing by the lifeline, looking out across the dark waters at the desert, white in the nightfall; his musing as to whether men, or kings on camels, had crossed it drawn by the star toward Bethlehem—some talk, too, there had been about the future of the ship; but most of all that it had been he who had wanted to articulate the words of home; then suddenly remembering something about Moses wandering in the desert. Hurley his reverent disciple, Preston had been bringing him along for his rating, in that special relationship, both ferocious and loving, in which a Navy man possessed of a special and indispensable knowledge and experience, hard come by over long years at sea, takes on the job of passing all of it along to a young and eager, often apprehensive apprentice. The boatswain’s mate’s words were so perplexing that I believe I did not immediately comprehend him. I must have asked him what he meant.
“Just that, sir. He’s gone.”
“Gone? What do you mean, gone?”
One would have thought there was nowhere to go at that place. That was what made the word, what Preston was attempting to impart, so strange, almost incomprehensible. I turned and looked across the beach at the last boat, loaded to her gunwales with men, ready to cast off; waiting for me, in fact. I was aware of the men in the boat watching Preston and myself beyond them with expectant and wondering looks, almost as if they had sensed that something had gone wrong. I took a couple of steps closer to the boat and sighted along the faces of the men in it. I turned back to Preston.
“He must have gone in one of the other boats,” I said.
The boatswain’s mate was speaking, trying to explain how this could not be. “Negative, sir . . . We were together at first . . . He’s a good runner . . . I blocked for him . . .” There was a pause before he went on. “He said something about getting in a swim . . . No, sir. He couldn’t have gone. We would have gone in the same boat . . . He . . .” The big boatswain’s mate hesitated . . . “Well, sir, he would have waited for me.”
I looked at him and understood. Of course. Almost a matter of respect, of proper deference. The boy—he was not much more than that—was under the big man’s wing. The word “gone” seemed to hammer at me in its slow-dawning twin meaning. For a moment it held me still, immobile in the initial glimmerings of foreboding. All of this time we were facing in the general direction of the sea and the waiting boat. I think we must have turned at the same moment and looked in the other direction. Then without knowing really how I had commenced doing so, or with any conscious intent or purpose, I found myself walking away from the water, across the beach, coming to the edge of it, stopping, gazing into the boundless waste of the great sands. We stood in silence, transfixed.
The huge scarlet ball started gently to lower itself impartially into both desert and sea, in an epiphany of immolation that stopped the heart, now the bottom half of it already gone, the top half fast disappearing and as it did, spreading a tint of cinnabar scarlet everywhere over that total immensity of desert, sky, and sea, as if bestowing upon the entire universe a queenly benediction. Before our eyes as in some miraculous ritual the desert turned that startling and exquisite color like some gown with which the departing sun rays adorned it for approaching nightfall. The great red ball vanished. Almost instantly a coolness, a chill, entered the air, as suddenly as if some deity charged with regulating desert matters had flicked a switch. With the chill, and the oncoming dark, the desert took on a spectral air, a powerful stillness so transcendent and forbidding, so impenetrable in its ancient air of mystery, that one ceased in awe almost to breathe, much less dare speak; one felt a sense of active menace, as from a violent serenity; fear crept in.
I had come to its edge, refusing to believe any man would simply willfully disappear there, not a sailor, anymore than he would jump overboard from his ship into the sea. We stood gazing far away into it, into its complete hush where now came like a tremor and a lamentation a sudden, a long and mournful sigh as from an actual human voice that sent through one a chill greater than that of the air—a keening breath of wind sweeping as a phantom across that enormous solitude, bent on its business of sculpting the huge and ever changing dunes; then that awesome silence again. Stood until our unwilling eyes were pulled downward to the deep and clear footprints that violated the virgin sand. Footprints naked, unshod. Our eyes came slowly up, in unison, and followed them to where they led inward into the desert.
Without a word we began to pursue them, Preston alongside me in an entire silence, the sand muffling our steps, our eyes looking always downward at the continuing trespassing track, a left-footprint, a pace, a right-foot one, feeling the depths of the sand pulling at our shoes as they plunged into and obliterated the other naked footprints. Then stopped again while our eyes lifted slowly and followed the ungiving line which continued on as far as they would take us. We walked a little more, hoping in our foolishness to see somewhere ahead the end of them, not once speaking, just looking forever downward at the lonely necklace of encroachments. Stopped again; looked up once more; stood once more gazing in a kind of transfixation at the trail of invasive footprints leading on endlessly into that sand vastness otherwise unmarked, chaste, undefiled.
The desert was beginning to darken. I glanced up and saw the evening star make its appearance in the eastern sky. Venus, all lonely and majestic; seeming oversized, overbright, gazing down itself on the great sands, on us, and somewhere out there ahead on another. The whorled dunes sliding westward into the night, reaching up to the multitudes of stars now coming on. We stood motionless in the chill—how astonishingly cold the desert could be when night came on!—surrounded in an absolute hush which we did not break. Listening for a faint sound from be
yond, a cry of distress, keeping our peace so as not to miss it. I felt I had never known such a sense of loneliness, no, not even on the most distant sea. Then suddenly loud and piercing yells began to break the stealthy stillness. Our own: which one of us came first I did not know, only that both of us stood there implanted in the sand, our hands cupped as megaphones to our mouths, shouting out his name over and over, first together and then, as if by arrangement, by turn, spelling each other, shouting at the tops of our lungs, until hoarseness began to overtake our voices. Only a vast silence flowed back to us in answer from the desert wastes.
“Why don’t I go see, sir?”
I turned sharply to him. Everything in my captain’s soul was brought to a state of intense alertness by the absurdity I had just heard.
“What? What did you say?”
“I could go look.”
“No, you could not.” I could hear the harshness in my voice, that captain’s sharpness of absolutely forbidding something. “Boats.” I spoke more softly. “There isn’t time. We’re up against our time limit right now. Mr. Selmon.”
“Sir, what if I just . . .”
“Preston,” I said, more sharply still.
I looked up at him in the fading light, at his largeness now taking on a silhouetted aspect which seemed to enhance that very image of vast strength. It radiated from him in an absolute promise of its validity, its availability. I suppose if it had come to such a foolish question as physically restraining him he could have brushed me aside with one blow, and nothing like a full one needed at that, from one of those massive arms. We stood in the sand as if rooted there, gazing into that void; the desert—it must have been the accelerating darkness, hurrying in upon us—seeming increasingly to surround us, its shrouded plain pressing in on us, almost as if to lure us onward, to say, You come along too, as though quite prepared and even hungry to swallow ourselves as well. Something so irresistible one felt oneself fighting against it, some powerful force beckoning us there shot through me, made me fear for ourselves, lest it pull us also into its mystery.
“Boats.” I could hear my own voice distinct in the enhancing shadows, the tones of a quietened and urgent plea. My concern about the one who had vanished was now entirely gone. I thought only of the one who had not. The ship was not going to lose anyone else if I could help it; and she emphatically was not going to lose her best seaman. “Who knows how much of a lead he got? It could have been an hour. It could have been two hours . . . He’s far away now.” I reached over and touched his arm and said the word. “He’s gone.”
He looked at his captain. In the chilling gloom, I could not see into his eyes, only a great muteness, a sort of stricken dumbness on his face, seeming to envelop his huge and desolate figure. Then he looked out at the unending trail imprinted in the sands, on into the desert distance. He would not disobey his captain, everything he was spoke against that. And yet . . . For a moment I thought he was simply going to turn and march off, following wherever those footprints led him. I tightened my grip on his arm, down into the hard flesh, my fingers seeming no more than would have a child’s to make a beginning on its circumference.
“Let’s go back, Boats.”
I could not be sure, so quietly did it come from him. He looked at me, then down again into that chain of footprints, and I thought I heard him murmur a single word: “Shipmate.”
“Boats,” I said, “they’ll be waiting for us. The others. The boat. The boat has to get back to the ship. We have to get back to the ship.”
I would never really know. It just may have been that one word that did it. To no one did it represent more—from no one need more. Or maybe a simple realization of the hopelessness of the thing, of its finality, out of reach now, of shipmates—of anything. He waited, still looking far off into that infinity of sands. Then his eyes came back and rested on me.
“Aye, Captain,” he said. “They’ll be waiting for us. We have to get back to the ship.”
10
Unknown to Geography
The mind was obliged constantly to range ahead, groping, into all unknowns. In the event Bosworth produced nothing; in the event the Mediterranean should fail us, as now appeared almost a certainty. As we moved ever nearer Suez the process—intense, searching, rejecting nothing, giving punctilious consideration to all—was stepped up: What before appeared remote courses, distant and unlikely options, now came more distinctly into contention as this sea’s promise fell away. So it was that I had ever more interrogatory talks with Lieutenant (jg) Selmon, who was sworn to secrecy, probing him for everything he knew on his subject: vaporization, incineration, fallout, contamination, radiation—whether of lands or of people. Especially lands I catechized him about. What most likely happened where? So much was guesswork, as I have noted, but general expectations, always subject to later, on-the-spot verification, could be attempted—indeed, we had no choice but to do so, then to exercise our most prudent judgment of the moment; then hope. Subject to such caveats, his feeling was that two places offered the most promise, these being the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific; that somewhere in all their immensity of waters lay the best bets of having escaped. For two reasons: the relative paucity of worthy targets in both; and, hugely important, because of the patterns of the planet’s winds.
* * *
My hand moved, a finger extruded and settled itself on a dot in the very middle of the Indian Ocean.
“Diego Garcia,” I said.
More than anything else, almost more than for an assured food supply, I longed for replacements of the cores of highly enriched uranium fuel on which our nuclear reactors ran. (Myself always having to bear in mind that the odds were stacked quite heavily against Pushkin’s quest on our behalf.) Lacking new fuel, we would simply come dead in the water in a matter of months. Every day’s steaming told me with a certain ferocity—I heard it in the very movement of the ship through the sea, each wave she took as though counting down—how little time really remained to find something habitable; that without fresh fuel we might have to grab the first thing we raised, however unfavorable otherwise, and that when we did we should never be able to budge from it. Given the new rods, we could go on more or less forever—or at least five years. What a millennium that seemed! What a sense of freedom it would give us! What burdens lift. These obtained: We could vastly increase our range over the waters of the earth; prospect many more places for possible habitation; have a look just about everywhere; above all, do both things—see home and look elsewhere; not have to make the terrible choice that would otherwise be forced on us in not many days more—at Suez, with what effect among the crew no man could guess.
One matter stood much in our favor. Beginning with the James class of DDG’s, nuclear-propelled ships were built around a much improved nuclear reactor, and one reduced in physical size. The size permitted two reactors in a ship such as ours but at the expense of core life. To compensate for this loss a technology involving serial replacement of fuel rods had been perfected, meaning that it was now possible to replace a limited number of rods at a time, thus continually extending the core life (eventually a “normal” refueling evolution would be required but the “serial” method significantly reduced its frequency). Accordingly, due to the improved design, remote nuclear support facilities containing replacement rods existed in a number of U.S. naval installations around the world, generally stored on board submarine tenders.
For our purposes I knew to a certainty of but two places where such tenders, storing such rods, were stationed.
“Diego Garcia,” I repeated. “Nuclear rods. Plenty of them stored there. We know that. Mr. Bainbridge?”
We were in the chartroom, just aft of the pilot house, the door closed: Lieutenant Bainbridge, the communications officer; Thurlow, the navigation officer, present because of his large knowledge not just of his field but of geography as well; and of course Selmon. A shaded light shone like a stage spot from directly overhead down on the chart table and upon the Mercat
or projection laid out there.
“Of course, we’ve tried raising it many times, sir,” the communications officer said. “As we have every place else.”
It was one of the largest United States Navy bases in the world. We ourselves had replenished there and I remembered the facilities for everything, every possible kind of stores and in huge quantities. Enough food stockpiled, for instance, to feed vast fleets, to feed a ship’s company of our size to the last days of even normally lived lives, and uncounted tons left over. No place on earth was more distant from America. It had been built for no other reason than that the distance between the Philippines and the Mediterranean was so great. Something in between was needed to care for fighting ships. In such manner did a Portuguese name, a piece of land otherwise unknown, unvisited, unimportant, become—the phrase was—a vital link. Vital links brought other things.
“Their long-range communications could be knocked out,” I said without much conviction. “Mr. Selmon?”
“If they got those they got all the rest, I would imagine, sir.”
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