The Last Ship: A Novel

by William Brinkley

  I looked again at the men on the port side. In their faces there was something like rapture, as if they were already home, had simply obliterated any thought of the appalling passage intervening; this alleviated in others by a clear grimness as to what lay ahead. In all faces something beyond reaching, irredeemable: I knew, in an infinite anguish, that I had lost them. I looked again at their leader below me. In his eyes I saw triumph but also something else: that hard look of a sea officer already in the process of becoming a commander of men, a peculiar gleam, a look I knew well—for I possessed it myself. He wanted no doubts left.

  “The boats to include the captain’s gig?”

  I spoke curtly. “Aye, Mr. Chatham. You shall have the captain’s gig.”

  “Then we will be ready to cast off at first light.”

  I was startled at that. Twelve hours. Yes, they had planned it all.

  “As you wish.” Now I allowed myself a brutal note. “For now, sir, you will go immediately to your stateroom and bring me your launch key, all keys to weapons systems and spaces. Preston!”

  “Sir!”

  “You will accompany Mr. Chatham. You are to stay with him until he has brought the keys to me. Is that clear?”

  “Aye, Captain. Very clear, sir.”

  The big boatswain’s mate stepped smartly forward from the starboard lifeline and took up a position close to the officer, eager, I felt, to keep an eye on him. A look half smile, half scorn crossed Chatham’s face.

  “That was unnecessary, Captain.”

  “Perhaps so,” I said. “But in this instance I felt it best to exercise my lawful powers.”

  Then I spoke to all. “Ship’s company dismissed.”

  From their port and starboard sides the parted men now moved, mingling again.

  * * *

  Chatham’s earnest desire for the captain’s gig was understandable. It carried forty-three men. Draft 3'19" fully loaded, length 41'6¼", full load displacement 28,800 pounds, fuel capacity 180 gallons, two 250 hp diesel engines. Sturdy, seaworthy—men had crossed oceans in boats less so. Equipped with provisions including sextant and nautical tables, radar, full sails rigging when the fuel gave out . . . towing lifeboats decidedly would not help . . . a fearsome voyage it would be. Still I believed skilled seamen had a chance. All our boats were supplied with exactingly chosen survival gear: bailers, flashlights with extra batteries, desalter kits, fishing kits, food packets, first aid kits, drinking water, Very pistols, signaling mirrors, portable radios, shark repellents, floatable knives, hatchet, signaling whistle, hand pumps. During the few hours I saw personally to it that they were further equipped as much as they could be with additional stores, food, water, other items; including small arms, ammunition, drums of diesel fuel—the reason for the third boat being these extra stores—that would give this arduous voyage its best chance.

  * * *

  Next morning, the sun just pushing over the horizon, every hand stood topside as the gig and the lifeboats were lowered away, then were laced together, the gig in the lead, the three boats astern her on short lines one after the other, the tents which could be raised over them in hard weather now lowered. It was a luminous day, a great serenity lying upon the waters under stainless skies of azure, everywhere the almost translucent stillness that had held these last days. I stood on the quarterdeck as each of the 109 passed by me before stepping onto the platform of the accommodation ladder in the order in which Lieutenant Commander Chatham had directed them, this also meticulously worked out by himself to place hands with the desired skills in respective boats. Each pausing a moment as he came abreast of me, starting to salute until they sensed that I did not want that; I shook a hand, pressed a shoulder: a man I had known as closely as I felt men could passed on, together we passed out of each other’s lives. My mind as I looked into their faces seeming like some endless kaleidoscope, unwinding back over my time with this man or that, fetching up an individual memory, something having to do with him. In every single case myself trying in that mind to discover, as he came before me, why that particular man was leaving, what had led him to his dread decision. Some even made sense. I found it almost weirdly natural that all three of the men who had married Norwegian girls back at our base in the Hardangerfjord went—Signalman First Brinton, Boatswain’s Mate Second Hubbard, Chief Quartermaster Hewlett, remembered myself standing up as best man for each of them in the little church of St. Peter’s-of-the-Sea, at Husnes, its steeple the last thing we saw standing out, the first returning from the Barents. I had somehow the feeling that they had vague, fanciful hopes of making it back to Norway—by what means I could not imagine, guessing that neither could they. More glad than not that Hewlitt was going. Other than Lieutenant Thurlow, he was the best navigator the James carried, would be invaluable to the voyage, perhaps crucial to its success. There were clear patterns I could understand. Most of those departing were men with families; wives, children. But then also a couple of women: one, Hospital Corpsman Lockridge, who had been closest of any of us to those wretched souls on the beaches at Amalfi and the other places along the littorals of Italy and France where we had stopped to render what little aid we could, herself giving direct physical help, bandages, medicines, where nothing could help, perhaps her sheer acts of emollience and care doing so for brief seconds to those spectral creatures looking at her out of sockets of eyes—myself, seeking any connection whatever, however tenuous, even farfetched, somehow tying that experience to her departure. It was all I could do to keep from asking some, Why, why? I asked none. There was no time, and the question would have been worse than senseless; yet unspoken and unspeakable thoughts heard between us in the remorseless silence. Ensign Jennings, the youngest officer aboard, a wife, a child he had never seen in Tulsa, Oklahoma, staying a moment in front of me; his lustrous eyes glaring like some bewildered son caught in events too large for him, in a mystery he could neither understand nor solve, into those of a father, as if I, whose relationship to him had not been unlike, might at this very last moment give him some answer; none to give, myself placing a hand on his shoulder, his moving on. Madness! I could only think as they passed by. Madness! And also silent, hoarded thoughts of a different kind, of the most immense thanksgiving as to the men who were not in that terrible line. Chief Delaney, the Missouri farm boy who seemed to know everything there was to know about growing things and who was so zealously tending the garden of seedlings he had started aboard that might one day make all the difference; Noisy Travis, the shipfitter, who one day might build us dwellings: these two men alone quite possibly indispensable to our survival. Others: Porterfield, our best helmsman and something else: if there was one man more than any other who had helped his shipmates to bear up, it was he—had almost willed some of them through after the launchings and down to now by some mysterious quality of the spirit he seemed to possess. It would have been sore to lose him. Thinking of times to come, I thanked God with all my heart that these, certain others, had chosen to stay with the ship.

  Then the last hand was down, only their commander remaining, standing beside me on the quarterdeck. It was the first time since these happenings that we had been absolutely alone. For those of my ship’s company leaving I had feelings such that only the application of the last measure of self-control I possessed had enabled me to see them pass by and step onto that accommodation ladder. For the officer who now stood before me: I felt I had never known until now what anger was. Not so much for the mutiny as such as for taking them into what now lay before them. Knowing it would be as senseless as the other, I did all I could to suppress it as well. Not with a full success. We spoke in a kind of chill formality.

  “I wish it could have been different, Captain,” he said.

  “There was never any chance for that, Mr. Chatham. Once you started making demands of the captain of a Navy ship. Once you decided you knew best. I hope to God you know what you are doing, sir.”

  “Naturally I believe I do.”

  I had no patien
ce with that; nor did I like his tone. I spoke with a cold rage. “I cannot forgive you for what you have done. I would have preferred to see you before a general court-martial had circumstances permitted. That is where you belong. Some of these men wanted to go on their own: That is true enough. But few enough I believe to cause the ship no harm. You did everything you could to encourage others. You misled them.”

  “Not in my view, sir. Who is to say which of us is right?”

  I was done with it. I looked down at the boats in the stilled waters, at their passengers, back to him. I wanted him out of my presence, gone. I spoke with an infinite disdain.

  “Now, sir, you will get off my ship.”

  He stepped onto the ladder platform, turned, facing upward, smartly saluted the national ensign high on the mainmast. The ancient Navy custom seeming a mockery; though I knew he did not intend it so, it was reflexive in him. Then he was moving down the ladder, stepping into the gig.

  The little flotilla of gig and three lifeboats rode gently just behind the ship’s stern, hardly bobbing on the resting sea. The fantail of the James stood filled with sailors looking a last time down into the faces of shipmates numbering some of life’s closest friends. The men and the women in the boats looking up at us on the ship . . . it was almost more than the heart could bear. The Jesuit, standing on the very tip of the fantail, conducted a brief religious service, sprinkling holy water, saying a prayer over the boats and their passengers. “Our God and Ruler of the Deep who alone knowest the hearts of men, alone knowest the truth and meaning of thy servants’ decisions, guide these our shipmates on their long and difficult voyage over the great waters. Watch ever over them, give them calm seas and good passage. Great Navigator, bring them at last in thy everlasting mercy to safe harbor . . .”

  Then simultaneously boats and ship were getting underway in opposite directions, the small and larger white wakes merging, hands of shipmates on both lifted in farewell. The Nathan James gathered way, proceeding slowly through the gently parting waters. All hands not on watch remained on the fantail, gazing as I did from the bridge wing at the four boats in column line, the gig towing the other three, moving away from us over a blue sea, glassy under the climbing sunlight, the stillness broken only by the quietened noises of gig and ship; the faces of all the occupants of the boats save only the coxswain at the helm of the gig seeming to me to the last turned toward the ship. Soon they were but specks on the vast and empty Mediterranean. Then they had vanished over the western horizon. I faced back, stepped into the pilot house.

  “Right standard rudder,” I spoke to the helmsman, Porterfield.

  “Right standard rudder, aye, sir.”

  “Steady on course zero eight five.”

  “Steady on course zero eight five, sir . . . Checking zero nine zero magnetic.”

  I could see it up ahead. “Helmsman, take us through Suez.”

  “Through Suez, sir.”

  BOOK V

  THROUGH THE GATES OF ACHERON

  1

  Eden

  Thurlow, Melville, Selmon. Navigation officer, engineering officer, radiation officer. It was with these three chiefly that I plotted our course with such care, probing long over charts spread out on the navigation table. It embraced three principal elements. The first was to take us on as direct a course as possible to the southern Pacific, where Selmon had calculated our best chances lay. Our course, as finally determined and refined in the light of all considerations, called for us to proceed N. by N.E. across the Arabian Sea as far north as Bombay; if finding nothing to turn about and make a S. by S.E. heading, reconnoitering the western littoral of the Indian subcontinent, and pass through the Laccadive Sea between the Maldives and Sri Lanka into the Indian Ocean; bending around Sri Lanka, east through Ten Degree Channel, then S.E. through the Andaman Sea and the Strait of Malacca, Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore to port, Sumatra to our starboard, here crossing the equator; from the Strait of Malacca entering the Java Sea, Indonesia to our starboard, turning then on a course almost due east into the Flores Sea, the Celebes to the north, thence into the Timor Sea, past Cape Maria Van Diemen into the Arafura Sea, the great mass of Australia to our starboard, through Endeavour Strait and into the great ocean-sea of the Pacific. Such a course, while in no way definitive—we had not the fuel for more extensive explorations—should at least give us a fairly clear idea of conditions in Asia and the chances of habitability there by leading us past the named lands, while proceeding by the shortest route to the Pacific, should they all fail us.

  We would, of course, allow for any detours along the way that seemed promising, approach various land areas both to determine if any contained living and viable communities of human beings, neither eradicated by direct hits nor contaminated unacceptably by fallout, and if so whether these might be of sufficiently hospitable nature to take us in; in the absence of such valid survivors, examining those areas to determine if any were, first of all, habitable as to contamination and if so able to support us through a natural fecundity of soil. We were not without hope in respect to these possibilities. Still, however, believing that our principal chances lay in the southern Pacific, and there in those areas “unknown to geography,” to use Thurlow’s phraseology. Allowing for the indicated side excursions, Melville now calculated that this procedure when completed would fetch us up at approximately 08° S. latitude and 164° E. longitude, where we felt with a reasonable certainty that, along with the above reasons, the long passage of fallout and hence its termination would have brought us to habitable regions. At that point, according to Melville’s rigorously measured computations, aside from emergency reserve, we should have remaining on the reactor approximately two months of running time in which to find a suitable place. All of these projections were based strictly on proceeding at a speed not to exceed twelve knots. It was thus that we emerged from the Red Sea and entered the waters of the Arabian Sea. The above reckoning, I should mention, allowed further for a brief exploration of east Africa on the chance—quite remote, but not, according to Selmon, to be dismissed entirely—that some livable area might yet be found along that coastline. A strictly controlled reconnaisance: We must not expend an excessive amount of fuel on this not overly promising diversion. I determined that we would test the shores of Somalia and of Kenya only so far south as the equator, and, should we find nothing, come about and proceed promptly on the first phase of our course, heading N. by N.E. bound for the Indian subcontinent.

  This course decided, I gathered the remaining ship’s company early of a morning on the fantail, and, having brought the ship to rest at a point about twenty miles off a place called on the charts Ras Mabber in Somalia, once again mounted the after missile launcher to tell them all of this in considerable detail.

  As I waited to speak to them, I thought how we stood on the brink of a vast unknown, lonely figures about to embark on the most uncertain of voyages, all beyond a black void. Yet something passed upward from them and into my soul, real as the sea around us. A strange and unexpected thing had occurred. Our numbers reduced from 305 to 195, I sensed to that captain’s certainty that succeeding the terrible events that had brought us to so much smaller a ship’s company, something had taken place of a nature I could never have foreseen. Abetted by that general inner urgency that had become so a part of us—that knowledge that griefs, however great, could not long be lingered over by men in our circumstance, survival itself requiring all attention to the pressing daily demands—we seemed instead in a mysterious and wondrous catalysis to be more tightly drawn together and to one another. It was as though in the act of choosing the ship, of making, for whatever reasons, these perhaps themselves varying hand to hand, that choice, the very fact of each hand who stood below me having separately, individually, of his own free will, personally done so, we were more shipmates than ever. Bound inseverably to each other; each and all bound to the ship; seeming to clasp us together in a fresh resolve. A faith incompatible with reason, greater by far than
the facts as we knew them justified, all ahead of us, the passage we were about to undertake, speaking of uncertainty, saving only the certainty of hardship and nameless peril. Vain enough, too, I was that, yes, I felt that the selection each hand had made embraced not just a personal choice of the ship but of myself their captain as well. That sovereignty, so powerful before, seeming thereby not just reaffirmed but conspicuously augmented; any remnant of doubt as to its validity there may have been vanished; as though whatever my decisions might now be, there would henceforth be no thought of questioning them. Ship’s company, such as remained: They rested in my hands. They had made to me the great gift of their fate. Something deeper than earth knew cleaving us to each other. Its strength already put to the test. Watch and watch we now stood, with these reduced numbers. Four hours on, four off, around the clock, day after day; a shipboard test of men normally brutal; now, not a hint of complaining, of malingering. I doubted not the fears beneath; their suppressing them but made greater the courage.

  I became aware of something else; something that came swelling on the air, like a field of force. In their faces something indomitable. For a moment—for the only time I could remember in all our odyssey except behind the closed door of my cabin, tears stood in my eyes; I fought them back: leaving something imparted from them to myself, my blood seeming to run freshly strong. A freshening of wind sounded its wailing sough, elegant as a flute, through the ship’s halyards. Then all was stillness again.

  “Shipmates,” I said. “We face a future which I have to tell you is as uncertain as a future could be. The course we are about to undertake: It will not be easy; it will be harder than I can say; we will have to bear pain. It will test our endurance to the limits. We will learn what fortitude is. We will need the last hand pulling his best to make it through, and all pulling together. But we are not without assets. We are seamen. We know the sea. We have under us the ship. We are American sailors. That is another name for men of courage; men who do not whine and do not give up. We have been through much; we have stuck together. Have helped one another without thinking of it as help. We have been a good ship. It is that that has brought us thus far. If we hold fast to it, we can make it. Find a place, make a home for ourselves, yes, a good home. We have the skills to do it. But we will need more than that. A good ship is a band of brothers. There has never lived a blue-water sailor but knows that. We have been that also: band of brothers and sisters. That is our strength. Above all we must not give that up. I count on every hand to keep to it. To help any shipmate who may need help; to help the ship. More than that, the ship counts on it. We ourselves depend for our lives on it.”