“The very fact I can do what I’m doing—murdering the innocent: Doesn’t that tell you how hopelessly flawed man is? If you should ask me what one thing . . . pushed me over the edge, you would doubtless say? Made me see reason I would put it. I’m not entirely certain. Usually in these cases it’s a little thing.” I heard an actual laugh, one of self-amusement, falling eerie on that moonlit stage. “Maybe the exact moment was when I saw snow begin to fall on the equator.”
In a way, in those elevated tones of his, it came out as a masterpiece of cogency, closely reasoned, imperviously rational: Someone had to take on this essential chore. Finished with a notation of the obvious.
“And of course the only possible way to achieve the objective, once defined, was to do away with the one means that could continue him.”
“Like me?” spoken almost softly.
“Like you and the other twenty-nine—was it?—I started with. Unfortunately.” The sentiment actually came through as heartfelt, honest regret at their necessary disposal.
“One by one. So that we are now only twenty-one. You have quite a few to go.”
“Yes . . . yes.” Abruptly a distinct tone of impatience had entered his voice, as if there being that many remaining it were necessary now to get on with the job, that they had given quite enough time to this colloquy, however fascinating to the mind the intellectual exercise.
He took a step forward. “But presently to be twenty . . .”
“You like to choke them first, don’t you, Mr. Selmon?”
She said it brutally, as a taunt. From across the ledge the rage came almost tangibly from him, as though at the unfairness of this caviling at his use of tools that after all were indispensable to his purpose. Now slowly, steadily on he came. She did not move, not even to step back; holding her ground, as though wanting him to come on; welcoming him. A wild thought tearing suddenly at my mind, a ship’s captain’s thought, that while we must not lose her, or another one of them, was there any way not to lose him whose skills we might yet mortally require—a moment’s idea that I might actually step forward onto that stage and reason with him. Then the insanity of the thought itself was obliterated as I emerged from the bush, knelt, took point-blank aim at the advancing shadow.
A gunshot, not my own, shattered the night air.
For a horrible moment I thought it had come from him. I looked quickly at her, with an immense relief saw her still standing there, saw moonlight glint as off something metallic, something she was holding. My eyes flashed back across the space between the two of them. The terns had awakened with a furious squawk into the night, this time exploding in a frenzy of white from their nests, beginning to swoop upward into the moonlight. He stopped, appeared to stagger, took another step toward her, even as she moved toward him, as she came on firing again and again in an orgasm of savagery, six shots bursting on the air until the clip was emptied; the body sometime during them seeming somehow caught in a convulsion of surprise, of total inexpectation, a spastic reflex appearing to jerk it upward, tremble it a moment on the cliff’s edge, where it pitched forward as though in flight, plunged high over the cliffs.
I came up by her, at the moment feeling in all that torrent of emotions rushing through me principally a hard anger; looked down at the .45 caliber she was still holding.
“I didn’t know you were carrying that.” I spoke harshly. I was shaking. “You never told me. You should have done so. Something could have gone wrong.”
She waited a moment, spoke in a quiet viciousness that sent a chill like ice crawling down my spine in the warm night.
“I wanted to do it myself.”
A shrill sound reached us from below. We looked over into the chasm. Under the moonlight we could make out the crumpled shape splayed across the great jagged rocks quite as three other shipmates had been, a flight of white terns circling as though in bafflement high over it, their shrieks piercing the peaceful night.
She ejected the clip methodically and stuck it in the pocket of her dungarees. We turned and started down the slope to the settlement. We had not gone far, crossing under the shadows of some trees, when a vibration seemed to go through her, bringing her to a halt, her body caught suddenly in a paroxysm of trembling. I put my arm around her. She stood there a moment, the tremor beginning to subside. My arm still lightly there, we continued, coming out from under the trees and into the moonlight lighting our way.
BOOK VII
ASTARTE
1
Advent
I had made up my mind to give him a decent Navy burial, the same as his victims, anticipating perhaps a mild demurral in a few. I was surprised therefore at the depth of the opposition from Girard and from some of the other women. Girard faced me off with it in a session in my cabin the day after the event on the ledge under the moonlight, during which time Noisy Travis was building the coffin, the funeral service set for the following day. She came on hard.
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “Putting their killer right alongside them. Jesus-God, Captain, he choked those women to death—or near enough to it before he tossed them over the cliff onto those rocks. He’s to lie right next to them?”
I tried first explaining. “Yes, he is, and let me tell you why. For seven months, no one aboard put himself at such risk to bring us through. The first man always to walk ashore—at how many dozens of beaches?—into radiation unknown when he did so. My definition for that is courage: uncommon valor, if you like. Something else. He is the one, more than anybody else, whose knowledge and skills determined why this island might be here, free of contamination, had a good chance of turning up. He found us the air we could breathe. We would never have made it without him.” I came down hard enough myself. “I don’t know what you have in mind, Miss Girard: taking him out to sea and feeding him to the sharks . . .”
“I wouldn’t mind that,” she butted in, unflinching.
“Well, I would. He went off the rails at the end but before that he damned well did as much as any hand to see that the ship didn’t. Before that he was a hell of a Navy man. A Navy officer. I aim to see him given a proper Navy burial.”
“You could do that,” she said slyly, “by taking him out to sea on the James. No burial more Navy than that.”
I was not about to fall for that, the act for him alone a pointed exclusion. I decided to use another reason, also valid.
“We can’t spare a drop of fuel.” I settled that.
The Jesuit had been present at that meeting; he had simply sat off to the side letting us go at it. She turned to him, seeking an ally.
“You see what I’m saying, don’t you, Chaplain?” A hectoring tone. “And it’s what most of the women feel. I haven’t taken a poll on it—I thought that would be obscene. And frankly I had no idea the captain would take this position. Well, what do you say, Chaplain?”
I cut that off before he could answer.
“It isn’t for the chaplain to say, Lieutenant. It isn’t the chaplain’s decision. It’s mine.”
“The women won’t attend the funeral service.”
I looked at her, something beginning to bristle in me. I tried to allow for her being overwrought, but I had to put a stop to this.
“Listen carefully, Miss Girard.” I could hear that familiar tone of mine, a captain’s voice, cold and hard when I had reached a decision and now expected all hands to shut up and obey it.
“They will not only attend it,” I said. “They will behave themselves as Navy officers and bluejackets are expected to when the captain issues an order. You will pass that word. Is that fully understood, Lieutenant?”
There was not an ounce of willingness in her answer. But I knew she would obey and see that they did so.
“Understood. I will pass the word.”
I dismissed her, curtly enough. “Now that that’s settled, that’s all for today, Miss Girard. The chaplain and I need to go over the Navy arrangements for the funeral. We needn’t detain you.”
She h
ad snapped to her feet and turned to leave as fast as possible, before she did simply looking at me, eyes flashing, a kind of loathing in them, saying but the one word: “Sir.”
So it was that Storekeeper Talley, Radioman Walcott, Lieutenant (jg) Rollins, alongside in their individual graves, and Lieutenant (jg) Selmon, in the fourth grave next to them, lie forever now on a plot atop the cliffside, a pretty spot overlooking the island one way, the sea the other.
* * *
The following month went a long way to get us back to a measure of normalcy in the settlement, the ineluctable reverberations of the awful deeds, however, but very slowly beginning to diminish in the face of the lifted restrictions: women able to go about unaccompanied by armed men, the island once again a free and safe place. I suppose it would never leave our memories, what had happened to make those cottages now stand empty in the woods. The cottages themselves were there to remind us, the small gardener’s crew of men and women continuing to tend and maintain them, lest the bush reclaim them, along with the remaining occupied cottages. For my part I tended to avoid coming near them; so also I felt did most of the rest of ship’s company.
So it was I sensed us beginning to put that horror behind us, as we had found it essential to our survival to put behind so many other horrors—Girard, surprisingly, with all her exceptional ability in the earlier ones to do so, having the greatest difficulty at it now of any of ship’s company. The deaths of her sister shipmates, Talley’s death in particular, seemed to have left a permanent scar deep in the soul, some inner change felt in her, myself deeply concerned. Meanwhile, in the cottages, that profound undertaking that Selmon had attempted to interrupt and bring to an end, and succeeded to the extent of making a considerable dent in our mathematical chances to accomplish it, continued, itself helping as much as anything to temper the immediate past, as we faced ahead to that most urgent of all considerations occupying the community: Would babies come?
* * *
It was an exceptionally pretty island day. It had rained the day before, the island entombed in a mist which cut off visibility to the Pacific to no more than a cable’s length. Work ceasing for that day, the farming and fishing details kept in, the men mostly giving themselves over to that project Girard had initiated in the mess hall, and which continued to fascinate them to an astonishing absorbed degree, of everyone putting down everything possible as to whatever specialty he was knowledgeable in, or for that matter anything else he thought of importance or interest about man and his history, to pass on to those children we all so fervently hoped would soon announce their presence in the wombs of women. The sun had returned after its day off, shining down out of cloudless skies of azure. Delaney’s people were back at the Farm. Silva’s had gone off to their fishing, and one could look out over the island and see it all freshened by the rain, the greens in their wide spectrum seeming more vivid, a glorious sweetness in the island. Thurlow was in my cabin looking out over the sea, not much business to attend to, ourselves chatting on sundry topics as they might occur. We had begun to spend more time together, why I was not sure, other than that I was coming to find in him, and perhaps he in myself, an audience, a kindred soul, for any and whatever reflections that either of us might want to engage in.
“As a ship’s captain,” I said, “I can swear to you, Alex, that not the least of blessings of our situation is that I no longer have to make out those damned officer’s fitness reports. Or go over those enlisted personnel evaluations. I never imagined that simply taking the paperwork out of a man’s life would be such an ecstasy. Would it be an exaggeration to say that of all man’s chains, paperwork more than any other kept him from . . . well, living?”
Thurlow laughed softly. “A defensible hypothesis, certainly. Now that you mention it, looking back I think people spent more time in shuffling papers than in any other single activity.”
Our manner in these conversations had become one in equal parts badinage and seriousness. “And would you further agree,” I continued, “that the greater portion of it was entirely dispensable; no one a mite worse off if, oh, say, nine-tenths of it had been simply jettisoned?”
“We’ve found it true here, that’s for sure. I guess we’re all becoming islanders, sir. It hasn’t taken all that much time, has it?”
“No, it hasn’t. I wake up thankful, go to sleep thankful, for that. I think that contentedness in the island, of having made such a good place of it—good to start with, of course—is one thing that makes the last hand of us long for success in the cottages.” Long since we had been able to speak frankly, in plain language, in almost routine fashion, to that matter, almost as to any Navy operation in progress whose outcome was of vital interest to us. “To have someone to pass all this onto—pass on the island and what we’ve done to make it a home.”
“Aye, there’s nothing everyone—the men, the women—want more.”
“To have children to hand things down to: Could it be that that’s the chief source of man’s happiness, well-being? Is there any stronger drive in man?”
“Especially this time,” he said, a bit of the lightness gone.
“Aye. Especially this time, Alex.” Myself reflecting his more sober tone. “To pass on whatever may be left on . . .”
I grinned, breaking that spell, too serious, a bit of grimness in it, that had suddenly come over us.
“Nature doesn’t change, does it, Alex?” Himself a man much interested in the large permutations of existence, the planet itself, the stars, weather . . . and of course, man and his place in all of this.
“Aye, sir. If we could all just learn to heed Nature, follow the directions she points us to . . . most of our troubles surely would go away. And they’re rather simple directions actually . . .”
Bixby, that day’s messenger on the Lookout Tower, burst into the cabin. These sailors knew to knock, someone like Bixby especially.
“Captain,” she said, steady enough but the most absolute urgency in her voice. “Porterfield on the tower. He’s raised what he thinks is a ship. Far out . . .”
I was already on my way, sweeping past her, feeling her and Thurlow right behind me, running toward the Tower, scrambling up it. Porterfield raised up from Big Eyes.
“Bearing two five eight, sir.”
I bent to it. At first only the vast nothingness of waters, the view to the horizon immense, nineteen miles from that Tower. We were long since accustomed to mirages—all of us had at one time or another seen something on some horizon that he thought was a ship, was not, not once. My eyes, fixing hard, then seeing her, on the very edge of the horizon line, just the shape of her, no other identification I could make out. Then her coming nearer, distinctly with the intent of closing the island. How fast she came on! I was about to give the order to Porterfield to sound the general alarm (the drill of action if ever occurred what was now occurring, a ship approaching, long since worked out, part of it being the quick manning of the Nathan James to go out and meet her in case she held hostile intentions toward us and our island) . . . about to order the GQ when I made out the long black configuration, possessed by no other ship I had ever known, and last seen what seemed an age ago on a distant sea; coming on, closing the island. As she did, the blinker light atop her sail area began to flash across the waters. Through the scope I read the letters one by one: T-U-R-G-E-N-E-V.
2
The Two Captains
The two vessels lying a scant half a cable’s length apart below the cliff; our own ship, the Nathan James, with her sleek gray lines; Pushkin, a low, long black configuration, actually a hundred feet longer; each pulling not at all at her anchors, each mirrored in the glassy waters; ancient enemies of the sea, destroyer and submarine, now lying in neighborly proximity. A quietness lay over the scene, over what was happening, and that seamanlike orderliness and competence, excluding the least evidence of agitation, of wasted emotion and energy, which takes over when there is urgent business to be attended to. Coxswains bringing our boats alongside
the submarine’s low Jacob’s ladder to offload Pushkin’s crew for the short trip ashore, our crewmen assisting each into the boat; presently each helped out, set ashore. I suppose more than by any other single aspect I was struck by what I would term the “naturalness” of the scene, in a way only another sailor would understand; there seemed the minimal of strangeness in it: But no mystery really in this. Sailors even of different nationality are closer than in perhaps any other trade men follow; normal barriers attenuated; by no means completely obliterated, but fewer to start with, and these more swiftly overcome. The explanation obvious: the mutuality of the sea and the sea life, the kind of men drawn to it and the kind of men made by it; origins hardly entering. Sailors off whatever ships inwardly know each other when they meet; they are never strangers. They are brothers of the sea.
More important even was that other ancient law of the sea, indelible in every seaman, of proceeding instantly to the aid of other seamen in distress; the fact that the two ship’s companies were coming together on land in no way lessening this iron commandment. These particular sailors had arrived frail, almost ghostlike figures, bodies depleted, not a few close to the edge. Our hearts went out to them, having been ourselves in not dissimilar condition not all that long ago. I will remember well that scene, watching it from the top of the cliff, when the Russian officers and sailors, scarcely a hundred in number, first climbed, step by slow, agonizing step, up the strong ladders we had fashioned for its ascent; in fact, in such weakened condition were many of the submariners that in each case one of our men went behind one of theirs on the climb, steadying him, helping him up the ladder, ready to catch him should he fall back. When they reached the top, the doc and the hospital corpsmen waiting to take in hand those who immediately needed their attention. The truth of the matter, as the Russian captain had explained to me, was that they were near the end of their tether; their food stores of any kind down to near-zero levels, themselves on just-short-of-starvation rations. We were eager to share the bounties of the island—the fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, fresh fish. What a joy it was to see the way in which these fellow sailors, without such fare virtually since the launchings, now some thirteen months ago, fell on these offerings. Men reprieved, they were, from the long imprisonment of their submarine. I believe they looked upon us as their saviors.
The Last Ship: A Novel Page 68
