The Last Ship: A Novel

by William Brinkley

  I watched the ship stand out, perpendicular now to the horizon, quietly, all-confidently, parting the stilled waters, seeming to admit her as an old friend, glad to have her back. It was a beautiful sight to me and one, I realized in a certain wry astonishment, her ship’s captain had never had the privilege of witnessing until just recently; I had always been aboard. I watched until she had disappeared over the horizon, bidding good-bye to her for the dozen hours required by the sun in its infinite precision to make its transit across the sky and to sink once more into the western ocean—at which time I would be standing there again, always somehow excessively glad, almost relieved, to see her safe return; occasionally, in the interim between departure and homecoming, that apprehension, totally without reason or foundation, ridiculous in fact, nothing surely but any ship’s captain’s exorbitant sense of proprietorship in his ship, having seen her vanish over the horizon, that she might not come back.

  Before stepping into my cabin I glanced up by habit at the Lookout Tower and could see the normal watch of three hands manning it; the principal lookout, Porterfield, standing at ease by the Big Eyes; Signalman Bixby at the portable radio to handle messages to and from the Farm across the island, a radioman now also always maintained there for anything it might have to say; a messenger, Seaman Garber. All of these precautions, I thought, surely inessential—day after day these watches kept, and of course nothing ever happening, nothing ever appearing on the blue immensity . . . I had recently begun to consider whether the time had come to stand them down—then Billy’s sighting that day always came back to caution me that another ship, not necessarily of friendly intent, might appear on those great spaces of water that surrounded us; we might need every moment we could get. This reminding me of that other massive weaponry not needed for this purpose and which so concerned Thurlow, reminding me further that I had made a particular arrangement to speak tomorrow with the Russian captain concerning the disposal, jettisoning of these, in both ships.

  During James’s one-day cruise, it was customary for ship and shore to keep in communication and from time to time that morning I stepped into the radio shack, not far from my cabin and manned today by Radioman Parkland, its limited facilities (the principal part of our communications equipment remaining on the ship) including a simple VHF ship-to-shore transmitter rigged specially for messages between the island and the James, and had routine conversations with her, the ship reporting the usual things. Today a smooth sea, skies entirely wind-free . . . the ship proceeding through her customary drills. I went about the day’s business. I believe it was about mid-morning that it happened. I have spoken in these pages of that special sense given, it would seem, to ship’s captains in respect to anything pertaining to their ships and their ship’s companies—especially, when that is the case, of something seeming not quite right. This phenomenon—if it is to be called so, though it is not even that to me—is a simple truth of the sea, as familiar to any ship’s captain as the elements of ocean and sky in which his ship moves, as the very deck under his feet. That sense came now. The effect of it is always curiously pacifying, in the meaning of bringing everything quiet and concentrated in oneself, as if one knew from long experience that the time was at hand when all one’s faculties would be required, no space left for the slightest scrap of emotion, space only for utter coolness to allow reason, and only reason, to take charge, in a matter about to be made known, an imminent confrontation. I was aware of myself rising slowly, stepping outside the cabin and going to where I had hidden my key, required for launching the missiles. The key was not there. I took the few steps to the cliffside, looking out to the vast seascape. The horizon blank, the Nathan James somewhere beyond it. I returned to my cabin, told the yeoman to find the Russian captain for me, his quarters nearby. They were back quite presently. “Let’s take a walk,” I said to the Russian. We stepped a few paces along the cliffside, stood all alone, out of earshot of all. I told him the bare essentials of the situation; the same dual-key system operative on his own ship, his fully and instantly grasping it; told him further that the three other persons having access to the keys were all aboard James.

  We walked, moving a little rapidly now, to the radio shack nearby and I sat down by Parkland in front of the ship-to-shore transmitter. A clear day for transmission, Thurlow’s entirely distinct voice presently on the other end. Myself making all-certain to keep my own entirely normal, making of routine enquiries.

  “The captain speaking, Mr. Thurlow.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “How is the run?”

  “Everything four-oh, Captain.”

  “Fine.” Every shred of emotion, of anything unusual, kept out of my voice, there was still no way in which he was not going to think strange what I would presently have to tell him. There was no help for that.

  “Mr. Thurlow, I want you to return to the island.”

  “Return to the island, sir?” The echoed phrase coming back to me, surprise to be sure, and as if not certain he had heard correctly.

  “Return to the island,” I said again, more sharply. “Do you understand me, Mr. Thurlow? At once.”

  “Aye, aye, sir. Understood.”

  I waited a moment.

  “What is your position, Mr. Thurlow?” and he gave it. I made my second fateful decision.

  “And Mr. Thurlow. Go to flank speed immediately. That means you’ll be here in . . .” I calculated quickly. “. . . Just short of an hour.”

  “Flank speed?” he questioned again; this time wonderment, an elevated surprise in his voice. Fuel-conscious, we never now brought the ship to such speeds on these runs. It was time to get off.

  “Flank speed, Mr. Thurlow.” I spoke in that captain’s tone which said, no more discussion. “Get underway at once.”

  “Aye, aye, sir. Return to the island. Flank speed.”

  The Russian captain and I stepped back outside, stood a few moments more gazing at the horizon. Thoughts rushing in on me now from every side, now that I had chosen my course of action and executed it; one of these, almost certainly imaginary, a feeling that in Thurlow’s voice there had been a tone of constraint, of not speaking freely, of perhaps not being able to, the tone of a man with a pistol pointed at his head; dismissing that as sheer hallucination.

  “Nothing to do but wait,” I said. “We should sight her in . . .” I looked at my watch. “Not much more than a quarter hour . . . fifteen minutes . . .”

  All I could think was: Girard, Thurlow, Delaney. The Russian captain and I stood like statues, looking out to sea, as the minutes ticked away our eyes straining ever more to the horizon. The repeated looking at my watch; of minutes, of seconds, become eternities. Something stirred in me. I stepped quickly back into the radio shack, told Parkland to raise the ship. I recognized the voice of the OOD, Lieutenant Sedgwick.

  “The captain speaking, Mr. Sedgwick. Put Mr. Thurlow on the horn.”

  A fraction of a pause. “Sir, Mr. Thurlow is not available at the moment.”

  “What do you mean?” I said savagely. “Not available? Put Lieutenant Girard on.”

  “Sir, she’s down in stores. I’ll send a messenger right away.”

  My voice came cold. “Mr. Sedgwick, listen very carefully. Are you proceeding toward the island?”

  The connection went dead.

  “Get him back,” I said to Parkland, sitting beside me. She tried; tried again, and still again. Nothing. Then I heard something strange. Not from the transmitter. From another source. I stepped out quickly onto the cliffside.

  * * *

  Far and away I could make out the long white wake left by the Tomahawk as it ascended into the pale blue sky of the Pacific, trailing its cone of fire. Then I saw it burst, a puff of smoke, not all that large. I knew it at once as a TLAM-C, armed with a conventional warhead—a Bullpup, 1,000 pounds of high explosives. As I watched—I could not see the ship—I saw another Tomahawk rising heavenward, leaving its signature tail, knowing as its booster rocket dropped o
ff that this one was different. It was a TLAM-N, a Tomahawk carrying a 200-kiloton nuclear warhead, and as it disappeared over the horizon without explosion, I knew that it was unarmed.

  I continued to watch the parade of missiles up into the blue. First a conventional Tomahawk benignly destructing itself. Followed by a nuclear one, discarding its rocket, harmlessly vanishing from sight. The sequence continued. Suddenly my vision was obliterated by a white light far, far brighter than any sun. Standing there for a few seconds literally as a blind man, before, sight returning, I saw from that same space a fireball, beginning to expand outward in all directions, and knew it instantly as a nuclear detonation. As I looked, another Tomahawk climbed the sky, following directly behind in the path of the exploded one, it also now bursting and throwing out its blinding light, my head reflexively turning to shield itself. In quick succession I could make out others ascending over that same vertical roadway, each exploding in its fireball to join the others in a vast conflagration of the heavens. Myself now vaguely aware that others of the settlement had come to join us and to watch what was happening high in the skies.

  The Tomahawks bursting one after another like roses to form a giant bouquet, this now magnifying in seemingly exponential fashion to occupy half the sky, soon then swallowing up, smothering in its embrace, the sun itself, while leaving the image of its presence shining through, as though the white sun of day had itself been transmogrified into another species of rose deeper, almost bloodlike, in color. A great flocculent white, moving in immense and infinitely languid layers, then beginning to coagulate with the mass as if to form yet another, variegated, dual-colored; the inane thought occurring that though I had launched them in the Barents and had seen their subsequent manifestations halfway around the earth, I had never witnessed the spectacle of their detonations, our practice runs in peacetime having of necessity to be done with conventional warheads. Their immediate effect, as they joined one another in quick succession, was one as much beautiful as awesome, and altogether glorious, as if the heavens had somehow conspired to give man, ironically before annihilating him with what the sight contained, set against their pristine blue, a display the grandest yet seen by him, vast in its dimensions, magnificent in its texture; an uncertain amount of time passing which none could have had the faculty to compute, and neither of us did; then, in yet another transmutation, as we watched, men struck immobile, impotent, glory was gone, beauty was attacked and eradicated, the rose and white beginning to convert into great roiling waves of black, of a violent ugliness, a vile and loathsome deformity, these effectively sealing off the sun as though night were falling much ahead of schedule—I glanced reflexively, mindlessly, at my watch, as if I had made some error in calculating the passage of the day, that surely it must be a half-dozen hours later than I thought; reading the time of 1118 to tell me I had not. Time itself seemed to cease to be a measure of anything. Suddenly by some violent effort, wrenching myself almost convulsively out of my dumbstruckness, activating the cold, icy reflexes of a lifetime of sailor’s response to peril, a ship’s captain’s knowledge instantly brought into play that the last thing to be dwelt on at the moment was why and how, nothing being more dangerous; not to think at all. I ran to the foot of the Lookout Tower and yelled up to the watch on the platform. Porterfield, lookout; Bixby, signalman; Garber, messenger.

  “Porterfield, sound the General Alarm. Then glass for Silva. Bixby, raise the Farm detail to come immediately to the settlement.”

  As the klaxon commenced its piercing, honking sound, seeming to rise discordantly over the peaceful green of a mystified island, I saw sailors moving rapidly toward the Tower. The Russian captain and I both from our near-cliffside observation post then looking a moment at the distant skies filling with those great curling waves of blackness; the thought unspoken flashing through me, surely through him, that an old enemy, one which both of us knew all too well and had engaged in previous battles, had returned to confront us again, no discussion therefore needed between us as to its nature; knowing further that every sailor standing before us knew, in a terrible awareness, its identity, its lethalness; saving time, no need to explain anything to anybody. Around us came men, not running, but walking rapidly toward us, American and Russian sailors. I looked at him.

  “Captain. Pushkin?”

  “Yes. At once. Everybody aboard.”

  I spotted Preston, told him to find the boat details and to proceed down the ladder to prepare to take on the crew. I turned and shouted the order in English and almost simultaneously heard his Russian obviously saying the same to his own crew. The men of both of the nationalities now moving quickly to the cliffside ladders, and starting down them. First down, the Russian captain. In orderly fashion, the men and women simply forming a line at the ladders, the moment one had his foot on the first rung, the next stepping forward and commencing the steep descent himself. Looking down I could see the ladders occupied from top to bottom by solid chains of moving sailors. Hitting the beach, each moving rapidly to the boats already manned, including the lifeboats under oars, a loaded boat heading toward Pushkin. I looked and saw the first figure emerge from the first boat, start up the Jacob’s ladder, from there down a deck hatch and, I knew, to the sail, even making out his form from the near distance, as the submarine captain, knowing also that his first command would be to make all preparations to get underway. I waited. Waited for the first man from the Farm to emerge from the bush. Message received, Bixby had called down to me, the Farm detail was on its way. Silva and his crew of three fishing today somewhere on the waters off the other side of the island: Porterfield telling me he could not pick him up with Big Eyes. “Keep trying,” I said. The waiting for the Farm people while otherwise seeming another eternity somewhat lessened by the knowledge that their arrival would coincide, more or less, with the time required to ready the Pushkin for sea, a species of grasping comfort in the realization thereby that these extra men, mostly Americans, a few Russians, would not be the cause of any delay in the urgent need for the submarine to get underway as quickly as possible. I looked up at the sky, seeing in a flash of thought all apocalyptic, as if we had been given all the close calls we were ever to be allotted, our measure of them run out, that this time it was at last all coming to an end, the great menacing pall forming; yet even now a thin blue line of hope from the fact that a good deal of clean sea still stood between that black thing and the island, a kind of wild reassurance at how it seemed almost to be standing still, the winds in our favor, or rather virtually no wind at all, recognizing this immense stroke of fortune, perhaps salvation itself, giving us time to abandon the island, the pall powered not by the wind but by its own engine force, pushing outward in all directions to propel itself with consummate indolence to all points of the compass, not intent particularly on attacking the island, its merely being a part of everything in its path it would soon engulf.

  Behind me in the bush I heard a rustle and turned to see the Farm detail beginning to emerge from the thick growth; thirty-odd men and women in all, breathing heavily from a swift pace. No orders needed by myself—they had eyes to see, too, and of a certainty from the Farm itself the skies had told them of something that had gone terribly wrong. Now they, too, proceeded swiftly to the ladders. I stood alone, looking around, a last check. The grounds, the buildings . . . Nobody anywhere. Glanced up at the high Lookout Tower. Porterfield, Bixby, Garber still manning their posts.

  “Silva?” I called up.

  Porterfield was still bent to Big Eyes. He had never stopped glassing. He raised up.

  “He’s nowhere, Captain.”

  It hit me like a terrible pain even as I said it.

  “We’ll have to leave them. The ship needs us. Come down. On the double. All of you.”

  Shooing them ahead of me, I followed them across the space and onto the rungs, the last four of us descending together, alongside, almost in a measured beat. We stepped off the ladders onto the sand, moving quickly to join the others in the last
boat, this presently pulling alongside Pushkin, where the only safety lay, a strange and, to the American sailors, alien sort of vessel, alien not from being of another nationality, that of no importance at all now, but such an opposite type of ship from their own, in fact their ancient enemy (not the Russians but the type of vessel itself), they destroyer men, the last ones now boarding the submarine, Russian sailors standing at the top of the Jacob’s ladder, directing them through the forward and aft hatchways. I swung up the ladder and went to the top of the sail, joining the Russian captain. I stood a moment looking up for the last time at the settlement atop the steep Pompeiianred cliff. The island stood deserted; our neat buildings all silent; stood as if in poignant resignation, as if saying good-bye.

  “Is everybody aboard, Captain?” he said.

  “Everybody I could find, Captain.” And I turned my back on the island.

  He spoke into the bridge telephone, the Pushkin swung and stood out to sea. He must have ordered flank, the submarine soon racing through the waters and straight toward that huge black mantle to all appearances moving not so much as an inch. Presently he spoke again into the phone—one would know he was asking for a sounding. He took one more look at the shroud in the high sky; ordered the ship slowed; turned to me.