The Last Ship: A Novel

by William Brinkley

  “The fuel,” he said. “What do you intend doing with it?”

  I sat and looked at the sea, down the coastline at the tiny particles of the two ships, trying to shake the old thinking. I simply didn’t know. I felt I would have to have time. A certain interval in which to permit the new conditions, new realities, to take hold. Perhaps the island was getting to me, beginning to exert its hold, its claim—had it not given us everything, held back nothing, nourished us? Life was coming to be quite good here, more so every day it sometimes seemed, settling into a pattern by no means without its attractions, its beguilements; something he might not understand: We had been here months, himself days. Unable to give any real answer to the question he had asked, I fell back on equivocation, on platitudes.

  “I don’t know. The idea hasn’t settled in. It was always . . . the thought that of course we must find out—had to find out. If we could. We couldn’t. That was that. So . . . it was very unreal . . .”

  My own words fuzzy, his came much more focused, almost as if verbally shaking me, his tone close to sharp.

  “It isn’t unreal anymore, Captain.”

  “Understand, we had given up expecting you . . . and the fuel. Now . . . yes, we have the means to go looking. Now, thanks to yourself, we have . . .” It was as if I were saying the words not to him, who understood it, but to myself, who didn’t quite and was now trying to make himself do so . . . “We have a ship which can do that. Go find out.”

  “We have two ships which can do that,” he said.

  Again, as if prompted to do so by a lookout’s sighting, we simultaneously looked down the shore to where both of them lay anchored. Why that thought—of not one, but two ships available for the purpose—had not occurred to me seemed even more astonishing. I found myself appraising the submarine in the distance; her lines, something unusual about her.

  “Captain, I have seen many submarines. Ours; some of yours. I have never seen one that size!”

  “She was the largest ever built,” he said, the barest touch, not excessive, of pride. He seemed to be studying her thoughtfully himself, even as he concisely, routinely, furnished me her salient naval aspects. “Two propellor shafts. Two reactors, three hundred and sixty MW each. Five hundred and sixty-one feet overall, eighty-five-foot beam, displacement twenty-five thousand tons submerged. Twenty-six, eight-warhead, five hundred-kt SS-N-20 missiles.”

  I thought of the Nathan James’s 8,200-ton displacement. Of our own missile power, relatively so small. I had always regarded us as a powerful ship; but compared with Pushkin . . .

  “You make us seem a lifeboat,” I said.

  “Of course, two-thirds of that space is for the SS-N-20’s. As you’ve seen . . .”

  He had more to say of her. “Oh, yes, her speed. Since there are no secrets anymore, Captain,” he said whimsically. “Forty knots.”

  “Forty knots. On the surface?”

  “Submerged.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “Captain, you have impressed me.”

  “Good. I was trying to do just that.”

  I found myself continuing to study that long black shape strung out on sheltered waters. A distinct aspect . . .

  “You find something else unusual in her, Captain?” he asked, almost, I felt, teasing me along.

  “Yes, I do. I see now. The sail area. That stub sail. I have never seen another like that. And one other thing. The hull. Much more of a . . . of a high rise to it.”

  “Very clever, Captain. You are almost on to her real secret.”

  I thought a bit, continuing to analyze her. “I wish I could say I were. I am not.”

  It was rather as if we were playing some parlor game in which I was to say, “I give up.” I didn’t say that. But unable to pin it down, I might as well have done so.

  “Well, sir, I will have to reveal all,” he said with that same Attic wit, as if giving away closely held secrets. “And risk a court-martial. Pushkin was built explicitly for operation in the Arctic ice pack. The high-rise hull—the stub sail structure: Both were to permit us to break through the ice for missile launch. Forward diving planes—you can’t see that from here—mounted on the bow so they could be retracted to prevent ice damage—submersibles of course normally having sail-mounted diving planes.”

  “How stupid of me not to have figured that out,” I said.

  “In fact, our permanent station was there—the Arctic.”

  I reflected how we might well have been near each other more than once on our station in the Barents, his transiting that sea to the Arctic; how he might have seen us through his periscope, how in turn he might have been one of the submarines that not infrequently turned up on our sonar gear.

  “But when you launched . . . ?”

  “A fluke. We happened to be in the Atlantic, just off Brittany. On our way back at flank speed to the Arctic. We had been sent rather abruptly on a mission unusual for us—to the Mediterranean—to keep an eye on your Theodore Roosevelt, which had suddenly showed up. What a monster! Stuck our scope up a hundred times to have a look at her. Biggest carrier ever built. I used to think, her sitting there in the cross hairs of Pushkin’s scope—forgive me, Captain . . . I believe you have an expression—shooting fish in a barrel. We have one something like . . . a single torpedo . . . Strange, we’ve still got all of those aboard . . . nuclear-warhead C-533’s . . . never expended a blessed one,” he said in what seemed a peculiar aside; picked up again. “Anyhow, then we were relieved on station by one of our other subs—Sierra class, as you called them—we didn’t need a submarine like Pushkin to do that job, if it became necessary—and ordered back to our proper duty—the Arctic.”

  He turned to me, as in a confiding manner, his voice exceptionally quiet.

  “Captain, let me ask you something. Did you know it was going to happen sometime? Know to a certainty? I mean in the sense of knowing that the sun would rise tomorrow?”

  It seemed an important point to him, why I could not tell. It was easy enough to answer.

  “Yes,” I said. “I knew that.” I suddenly felt I understood what he was getting at and added: “I would imagine that everyone in our position—yours, mine . . . or something like it . . . knew it, don’t you? Everybody . . . on both sides . . . who was out there looking down the other’s throat.” I thought back a moment, trying to recall, to be as accurate as possible, since the matter seemed to be of some concern to him. “So much so that we almost never talked about it . . . Right now, I can’t recall a single conversation of that kind.”

  “Just so,” he said, as if that were the answer he sought, for reasons known only to himself. “To men like us—both sides as you say—doing what we were doing, it was only a matter of when, wasn’t it? One thing we were certain of—we’d never see the end of the century. Nobody so much as mentioning that”—an almost imperceptible shrug of the shoulders—“for the very good reason of: What in the world good would it have done? Who was there to hear?”

  He shifted a little on the rock ledge. “I wanted to get your opinion because . . .” He paused, as if wishing to be exact with his words. “In a way, that was the strangest part of all. I used to wonder if that had ever happened before: the people in the uniforms, the naval, the military people, most of them—not wanting it. Certainly they had in times past: After all, it was their profession. Not this time. True on our side. Yours?”

  “Practically nobody wanted it,” I said. “Military or not.” I had become thoughtful, concentrating, caught up in his own odd exercise of trying, apparently, to solve a baffling enigma. “And yet it was going to happen. To me that was the strangest part. It was almost as though these things were there—so they simply were going to be used.”

  He examined that thoughtfully in turn. “Had to be used maybe? It would have been too much of a waste not to use them?”

  I found myself beginning to have something almost strange as an affection for this man. Felt something of the same sort happening in him as regards myself—su
ch feelings can hardly exist one-way. Nikolai Bazarov his name was: I caught myself from addressing him by his Christian one. He, meantime, brought himself back, as from a reverie, or a trip into the otherworldly, to his factual account.

  “We had got as far as off Brittany when everything happened.”

  “And being handy, you were ordered to take out our Spanish bases . . . And Gibraltar a side effect.”

  “Precisely, Captain.” He spoke in reflective tones, simply as if wanting to wind up the account in a neat, sailorlike fashion, one ship’s captain to another. “I don’t know if your ships had fixed targets.” My heart, mindful of Orel, fearful he would ask that of the Nathan James, not certain I would give a truthful reply, skipped a beat. “I expect so. In any case ours did. I came to identify our squadron of Arctic submersibles not so much with their actual names as with the American cities they were variously assigned. This one, Washington. That one, Chicago. That one, Houston. Pushkin’s happened to be New York.” A soft, indefinable trace of a smile. “I pretty much came to think of her as the New York.”

  “New York?” I repeated inanely. Why that should have given me such a turn I couldn’t say. Someone had to have that assignment; then—of course, the fact of the man who did being beside me. I listened to that voice, a peculiar, almost musical note now in it.

  “Odd thing: I always had a desire to visit New York. Of course, I suppose everybody on earth did. The great city of our times. Like Rome of old. Wished I could somehow get a leave, a week or so, have a good look around before we ourselves . . .” He took a deep breath. “One got some strange thoughts on a ship submerged up there in the Arctic . . . One got strange thoughts in a submarine with our mission . . .”

  “Not just on a submarine,” I said, remembering some of ours in the Barents.

  “Where was I? Oh, yes. New York: We had to be very good to get that mission. And I won’t deny a certain pride in having been given it; true of myself; of Pushkin’s company.”

  He waited in contemplation, in ponderment; I could see the parade of things past trooping through his mind; a spectral feeling unaccountably beginning to take hold of me.

  “I spoke just now of how most of us—and on both sides you agreed—who were out there possessed the least taste of all for what we knew was going to be. Still, I am ashamed to tell you the feeling I had when I knew the hour had at last come and that by the unlucky chance of where we happened to be, our mission was downgraded to a couple of Spanish bases instead of the honor of taking out your great city. I actually felt cheated. For one small moment I had exactly that thought. Regret. What a terrible thing to have had it at all.”

  I felt no shock whatsoever at that, and promptly told him so.

  “A very natural feeling, Captain, to my way of thinking. Not to want it but if it was going to be . . . I would guess that to have been true of just about everyone commanding a ship with your assignment, with our assignment. Every one of us . . . ship’s captains.”

  “Perhaps. But I tell you, things had happened to our minds, Captain.”

  He paused a moment. “We never learned to talk with each other, did we? How monstrous that was.”

  He looked out at the vast seascape. “At all events, our own regular Arctic station . . . Fourteen minutes: That was the distance we thought of New York as being. Our entire cargo of missiles navigationally always targeted on her. One of them would have done the job—we had allocated twenty of the SS-N-20’s just to that one city. Redundancy. I know you did the same.”

  “Oh, yes. It was the governing word.” Now myself falling into his rather relaxed analytical mood, as if examining, as he said, some historical curiosity. “Just about the most important word ever it became. The reason for so many; for always adding on.”

  “One of the poets from my city of Orel might have written—if he had been around to do so—that we succeeded in making the world redundant.”

  We waited in the silence.

  “Dostoevski.” He said the word with a singular reverence. It seemed to hang in the air. “Do you know the Grand Inquisitor scene in Karamazov?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Inquisitor may have had a point. Man had too much freedom. Freedom to eliminate himself.”

  In his words there was an absolute absence of bitterness, of cynicism, virtually—except for that one instance—of emotion. I did not find this strange—something of the sort had come to be true of myself, of my ship’s people. With some exceptions, a singular detachment—I had always connected it with the mind’s concern as to holding on to its reason; mind knowing that men in our circumstance must hoard their bank accounts of emotion, frugally expend. In this respect himself having progressed to a point perhaps a step ahead of our own. He talked more like a calm and professional student of history, preoccupied less with the morality than the actuality of accomplished events, probing matters of fascinating scholarly interest. Nevertheless suddenly a quiet laugh, equally free of the slightest trace of the sardonic, reaching my ears, actually startling me and enhancing that sense of the phantasmal I felt.

  “Where was I? Oh, yes. New York was obviously turned over to one of our sister ships. And we got the Spanish bases.”

  The account was complete. I was silent a moment, again looking down the coastline at the huge submarine in the distance, reflecting on her story, her fate, which at last had brought her here. I murmured a banality.

  “So you still have left an Arctic submarine.”

  “Anchored here in the tropics.” He sighed. “Ironic, isn’t it?” He suddenly brightened. “I wish there was an ice pack around to show how easy it is for Pushkin,” he said, again with that allowance of pride any captain has in his ship, in what she can do. “She loves ice packs.”

  “It’s still a good piece away but I guess the closest place would be the Antarctic.”

  He grinned. “Ice is ice. Same as the Arctic as far as Pushkin is concerned. Shall we make a quick voyage there—at those forty knots—so that I may demonstrate her capabilities to you?”

  “I’ll take your word for it, Captain.”

  We turned away from that diversion. Waited, thoughtfully. Then, back to realities, presently I could hear him going on. Tones again conversational, even, straightforward—in short, the briefing tones of a trained and disciplined naval officer who has something to say and was now, temporarily sidetracked, coming to the point; yet, as he continued, at times strange hesitancies which at first baffled me until I made up my mind that, not just a briefing, he also was feeling his way as he went, as any good seaman would, knowing himself in unfamiliar waters, these including the people he was dealing with, and represented in myself. He was not into my mind yet. I think he was trying to get there, and that all of the otherwise rather inexplicable dialogue he had initiated was part of his method of doing so.

  “I have a plan,” he said, looking out at the horizon, the sea having darkened a fraction, its line clearer. “With your permission, I would like to set it forth, the principal lines of it, inviting you to disagree. May I proceed with that understanding?”

  “Please do so, sir.”

  “We have two ships; each now able to go anywhere. Nathan James: five-year fuel supply. Pushkin: ten years. Go separately; go together. But we also have the island . . . a place. A place which you Americans . . .” It was the first time in this context that identification or distinction of any sort had been made and it came in all praise . . . “good seamen, found. Something habitable, a place free of contamination . . . and having found, have built something fine, built well, built as sailors build . . . have brought food from the earth, from the sea . . . labors so hard one can scarcely imagine them . . . yes, something fine, very fine . . . I see it, I sense it. No, have done something much more . . . Have started a way of life . . . a community, one which functions . . . That community, this island—that is the most precious thing of all. We must hold on to the island . . .” I became aware with a certain shock of the word “we” entering this monologue
. . . “We must never give up the island . . .” The word “island” striking like an epiphany, but now with a new ring, as if it were no longer just ours in fee simple, but his as well . . . an astonishment in me at this sudden interjection of joint proprietorship from one so newly arrived, deciding it meant nothing, actually could be favorable in the sense of taking him and his people in, and perhaps after all he had purchased his share with the most valuable of coin, the fuel . . . “It must be held. A great treasure, greater even than the ships . . . one such blessed plot of earth . . . that accepts men . . . more, nurtures them. A place without price . . . And yet . . .”

  It was a rather marvelous speech, not without eloquence, and no reason in the world for me to think it was anything other than heartfelt. Still, I felt it a time to keep silent, to wait for the proposal he said he had in mind. And now this thing of substance came, the words breaking into the vast silence that held everywhere, otherwise broken only by the metronomic collision of the sea and the great rocks far below; his voice reaching me in quiet, rather pleasingly assuasive cadences. He simply nodded at the horizon.

  “I do not think we can escape the . . . necessity . . . the responsibility, I believe it fair to call it . . . of sending one of our two ships on a mission to find out. The ship—either ship now, as I say—has the fuel to go anywhere. How long the voyage will take . . .” Again his shoulders shrugged almost imperceptibly, as at an unimportant detail. “Three . . . six months perhaps. In any case something less, I would judge, than, say . . . a year. Either ship can carry enough provisions for that period, even a submarine—those missiles we shot off gave us some extra space. What we would do, you and I, is: chart a general course. The ship herself free to make alterations, course and destination changes, as she proceeds, based on her own findings. Based, too, on what she reports back to us, final decisions to be made here. It should be an interesting voyage.” He smiled thinly, turning slightly to me. “Rediscovering the world. A Magellan, a Drake, a Bellingshausen, all over again. Eh, Captain?”