Voyages of the Seventh Carrier

by Peter Albano

  “No,” she said, mixing two scotch and sodas. “Captain Avery will have to be patient. At least Commander Bell understands computers.” She turned, a drink in each hand, and walked toward him. “Do you really think Avery believes pirates are responsible for the loss of Sparta?” She handed him his drink and sat down beside him.

  Brent sighed. “I don’t think he believes pirates, madmen, Russkies — any of it.” He drank deeply, feeling a new visceral warmth. “It’s all far out to him, especially my Zeros.” He brought the glass to his lips thoughtfully, and emptied it with a quick toss of his head.

  She took his glass, walked quickly to the bar. “And Commander Bell?” she said, returning with a fresh drink.

  “The same,” he said, taking the drink, sipping and then tabling it. She sat close to him. He grasped her hand. “They can shrug off the Mayday, but the World War II ammo is hardware. You can’t shrug off hardware.” He took another drink, felt the warmth spread. Then he sank back, sighing.

  She brought her legs up on the couch and leaned to him, breast pressing against his arm. Slowly, she traced a finger across his forehead, down his cheek. “Feel better?”

  He nodded and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Yes.” He raised his half-empty glass. “This helps.”

  She brushed his cheek with her lips. “You saw the Coast Guardsman?”

  “Yes.” He drank. Turned his glass slowly, ice cubes making a bell of the glass. “He’s in bad shape.”

  She shook her head before asking softly. “How bad?”

  “He may not make it.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “He wasn’t coherent — hallucinating.”

  “About what?”

  “An island.”

  “Attu, Brent?”

  “That’s what I thought, except he seemed surprised like he saw it where it didn’t belong. And there was something else that just didn’t fit.”

  “What?”

  “Flowers.”

  “Flowers, Brent?”

  “Yes. He was yelling about huge flowers.”

  “That is strange, especially in the Aleutians.”

  “And Pam, they wouldn’t get that close to an island — not close enough to see flowers, and the visibility is always lousy, too.” He turned his palms up. “And the islands are almost bare, anyway.”

  “Right, Brent. They are barren.” She drank slowly, then put her drink on the table. “Did he say anything else?”

  His voice was heavy. “He calls his pilot and crewman just like they were there.” He emptied his glass.

  “Damn.” She picked up his glass, refilled it quickly, and clutched his hand as she sat down. “Brent,” she said, deliberately changing the subject, “you said you discussed Sparta after I left the meeting.”

  He nodded. “Along with pirates, madmen, and the rest.”

  “Why did you have your brief case? You never carry it around the office.”

  He straightened and smiled for the first time. “You don’t miss a thing.”

  “Cryptographers aren’t supposed to.”

  “Submarines.”

  “Submarines?”

  “Yes. My brief case was full of submarines.” He laughed. Then he told her about the ST Zero and his proposal.

  “And Avery received you enthusiastically,” she said, wryly.

  “Like herpes two.” They both chuckled.

  She sipped her drink thoughtfully. “You know, Brent, I think we should talk to my uncle, Mark Allen.”

  “Rear Admiral Mark Allen? I hear he’s retired.”

  “Almost. He’s finishing his duty as an assistant to Comthirteen.”

  “We discussed him. He had duty with my father and Mason Avery in Japan just after the war.”

  “Right. He’s an expert on Japan. In fact, he married a Japanese, Keiko Morimoto.” Brent nodded. “He did a lot of work in the Sixties and Seventies with Japanese holdouts. I know he’s well acquainted with one who held out on Lubang for decades.” She tapped her temple with a long, manicured nail. “His name — his name … ” “Onoda!”

  “That’s the man, Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda. Uncle Allen’s an expert. Would you like to meet him? He lives on Queen Anne Hill.”

  “I’d love to. I’ve seen him a couple of times at meetings and once at a party with his wife. But I’ve never met him informally.”

  “Good, Brent. I’ll phone him — see if I can set it up for tomorrow night.” She began to rise. He grasped her hand and pulled her back, surrounding her with his big arms. She touched his cheek with her lips and smiled. “You feel better, Brent.” He kissed her. Her mouth was open, hungry. “A man wouldn’t be normal,” he said, huskily. He ran a hand down her side, over a trim hip. “You thought this dress was ah — less provocative.”

  She laughed, kissing his neck where she felt the hard pulse.

  He continued, mouth close to hers. “Oh, naive woman. It’s not the material. Oh, no, not the material.” His hand was on her thigh. Then it moved downward, curled under the hem and moved upward, slowly, over warm flesh.

  She moaned, pulled his head down. Covered his lips with her own open mouth, tongue darting. Slowly, she lay back, pulling him with her, finally feeling his body cover her. She was filled with an ineffable joy. This is right, she told herself. Nothing has ever been so right.

  SEVEN

  5 December 1983

  The smaller members of the marine mammals known as cetacea are called dolphins or porpoises. Larger members of the order are called whales. Unfortunately for the order, the larger members are of commercial value to man, producing meat for both men and animals, oil for industrial lubrication and conversion into soaps, cosmetics and detergents. Even the bones are useful, ground up and processed for use as fertilizer and glue.

  The blue whale is the largest animal ever to inhabit the Earth, some measuring over 100 feet in length and weighing more than 140 tons. The blue feeds in the Antarctic, north Atlantic, and north Pacific. Migration routes take the blue north to the Arctic seas where it gains weight with incredible rapidity as it feeds on huge swarms of polar krill.

  Aleuts have killed whales for centuries. In times gone by, without line or float, these daring whalers used only a harpoon coated with poison. Using two man kayaks, the whales were approached stealthily. After the harpoon was driven home, the canoe was paddled hurriedly back to shore and safety. With any luck, the whale would die in a day or two and its carcass, swollen with gases of decomposition, would float to the surface where the owner of the harpoon would claim it and tow it to shore. This method was highly inefficient. The Russians have made vast improvements.

  One of the most efficient Russians was Capt. Boris Sinilov, who enjoyed whaling, even in the rough, cold north Pacific. Fifty-nine years old, tall and broad, with icy gray eyes and iron hair to match, he was an ex-infantryman who turned to the sea as a catharsis after the blood, mud, and slaughter of Stalingrad, Kharkov, and Smolensk where an eighty-eight’s shrapnel took him out of the war until 1945. Then, assigned to Mongolia, he burst across the Manchurian border on eight August 1945 with one-and-one-half million other Russians and destroyed the Kwangtung Army in twenty-five days. He returned home to find himself alone, his mother, father, and two sisters shot and thrown into Babi Yar — a ravine outside of Kiev that the Germans filled with over thirty-three thousand corpses of subhuman Jews, Slavs and Gypsies.

  But now he was a captain, breathing clean sea air on the bridge of the forty-meter catcher boat Kalmykovo. The morning of five December found him on the vessel’s bridge — a tiny, square compartment, exposed and cold — hands gripping the gyrorepeater, swaying with bent knees to the jerky motions of the small ship.

  Sinilov’s eyes were not on the repeater. Instead, he stared impatiently at the bow where gunner Fyodor Kovpak had finally settled behind the seventy-six-millimeter harpoon gun. Despite the gyrations of the gun platform which projected over the bow, he could see Fyodor check first the harpoon, then the time fuse on the bomb whic
h would explode six seconds after it entered the whale, and finally the nylon rope secured to the end of the weapon.

  As captain, Boris had personally inspected the thick manila line attached to the nylon rope. Honoring his responsibilities, he had studied every millimeter that ran right up the foremast, over spring-mounted pulleys and down around the drum of the winch, all the way to the forward hold where six hundred fathoms of the stout line lay coiled. Even the scarce, giant blue they were tracking did not have the remotest chance of breaking that line.

  There were three other men on the bridge all dressed as was their captain: boots, heavy trousers and jackets, and fur-lined caps with earflaps that hung like poodles’ ears. Seaman Semyon Starinov gripped the huge, old-fashioned spoked wheel, Seaman Georgy Volynsky manned both sonar and radar, and Comrade Kuzma Nikishev, Zampolit of their factory ship, Gelendzhik, which was almost 150 kilometers to the west. Boris suppressed a smile as he stole a look at the pasty-faced Kuzma, leaning against the port bulkhead, gripping a handrail.

  The captain despised all Zampolits. True, some young Soviet sailors had had their heads turned by bourgeois propaganda and defected. But whalers rarely entered Western ports. In fact, whale-loving madmen, victims of lies pouring out of the International Whaling Commission, had harassed Russian and Japanese whalers, the only nations with whaling fleets. Now Comrade Kuzma Nikishev had been inflicted upon them, holding classes on the Gelendzhik, lecturing the officers and insinuating himself into every operation.

  Boris chuckled, remembering Nikishev’s reaction when he first saw a whale processed on the meat deck of the Gelendzhik. As usual, the carcass had been winched up the stern ramp tail first. Boris had been standing next to Kuzma Nikishev on the port wing of the bridge when the flensers, wearing heavy clothes, rank with stench and stiff with dried blood and the soles of their thigh-long boots bristling with spikes to grip on the whale, began their grisly ritual. Carrying long-handled knives shaped like hockey sticks, they swarmed over the whale. Boris could still see Kuzma leaning forward, fascinated, watching as one man, high on the whale’s body, began slashing from tail to snout, exposing blubber as thick as a man’s leg. Other flensers hacked white furrows along the glistening back, all slashes meeting at the nose. Then a hawser was attached to this precise spot and a great length of blubber started peeling off, curving like the skin of a banana. At this point, Kuzma Nikishev was green, but still under control.

  In minutes, all the blubber had been peeled away, chopped into blocks, and thrown into hoppers which sliced the meat and fed it into steaming boilers. The whale was now a mass of gory meat. Again the men attacked, hacking at the lower jaw and head. Then it happened. Quick to decompose once free of the water, gases had built up in the animal’s cavernous abdomen. There was a pop, like a harpoon gun, and the whale’s stomach burst open, disgorging intestines and burying two men in a gray-red, slimy tidal wave. The rotten stench of death overwhelmed the bridge. Kuzma Nikishev lost his breakfast. Boris laughed.

  Now this indomitable political officer, with no stomach, was at his side again, determined to watch an execution. Kuzma turned to the captain. “Captain,” he said, in a thin, high voice devoid of respect, “you will approach by sonar, correct?” The words sounded like a command.

  “He was already spotted by our lookout,” Boris stabbed a finger upward to the crow’s nest, “on an easterly heading. He should surface in about ten minutes.” And then turning to Georgy Volynsky, “Sonar?”

  “Range one hundred meters, bearing zero, zero relative, Captain.”

  “You see,” Boris said, turning to Kuzma as if addressing a schoolboy.

  “I know,” Kuzma bristled. “Let me remind you. Captain, I am here to solidify party loyalty and observe operations.”

  Solidify party loyalty, Boris said to himself. Make this krill angry and I will be a nonconformist and find myself caught like a fish in the Gulag net. Boris clenched his fists. “What is it exactly you wish to know?”

  “Your procedures. I have never been on a catcher boat.”

  Boris stared ahead over the bow, showing a high level of concentration that concealed the fire burning at the bottom of his stomach. He spoke slowly. “It is simple, Comrade. Georgy reads ranges and bearings from the sonar. We track, trying to be within twenty-five meters when the whale surfaces to breathe. Gunner Fyodor Kovpak then fires the harpoon. Six seconds after a hit, the bomb goes off.”

  The political officer studied the bow gun. “That’s a narrow harpoon, Captain. Does it ever slip out? Can’t whales escape?”

  The captain shook his head. Pointed. “See the harpoon’s swivel head.” Kuzma nodded. “Three barbs are lashed together. When the harpoon enters the whale, the barbs snap out. The whale cannot escape.”

  “Then, a sure kill.”

  “Not necessarily, Comrade Nikishev. Sometimes we must pursue — put another harpoon into it.”

  The ship’s public address system rang with the lookout’s ancient whaler’s shout, “Blowing dead ahead! Range one hundred meters.”

  “Very well,” Boris said, pointing at a high spout of water, quickly blown into a mist by lashing winds. Fyodor Kovpak, standing behind his gun, circled an arm. Boris rang “Full Speed” on the engine room telegraph. He felt the ship surge as the diesels roared. For several minutes, Kalmykovo lurched and staggered through the seas, spray and occasional green water smashing into the bridge. Kuzma shuddered.

  Then the gunner, without turning, held the palm of a hand to the bridge. Boris rang up “All Slow” on the telegraph. They were almost on the whale. He was huge, like a broached submarine, seas bursting over and washing his great back. Boris held his breath.

  “Why won’t he dive?” Kuzma asked.

  “Whales are unpredictable. He may dive, he may lie on the surface.”

  Slowly, the catcher boat closed on the huge animal which wallowed on the surface, disporting himself like a frog on a hot day. “He chooses to play,” Boris said icily. “This will be his last game.”

  Most of the crew, always intrigued, were on deck for the kill. The cook, off-duty engine men, all were leaning into the wind, staring ahead at the playful, doomed monster. Every man on the bridge was a statue, welded to the deck.

  Fyodor crouched behind his gun. With a boom, the harpoon slashed over the water, line hissing behind it. It crunched into the whale, spraying blood. Boris felt a surge of excitement, almost sexual in intensity as he watched the great animal thrash its tail madly, whipping the waves to foam. The great head shot up, mouth agape as if trying to scream. There was a thud as the bomb exploded. Boris could see Kuzma lean forward, breathing hard, face flushed like a lover with his mistress. Now the whale was in a frenzy, churning the sea crimson. The animal turned and leaped, first the head breaking water and then the tail, flippers beating wildly, every contortion filled with rage and torment. And the harpoon line sang out over the rattling winch as the whale lashed, trying to pull away. But then a crimson fountain burst from his head.

  Kuzma turned to Boris. “This is the moment, isn’t it, Captain?”

  “The moment?”

  “Yes. The kill, Captain.”

  Boris gazed down at the wide, excited eyes silently. “Yes,” he said, softly. “This is what it is all about — the kill.”

  Suddenly, the ship’s public address system rasped with the voice of the lookout. “Captain, something on the horizon — moving fast, bearing zero-nine-zero relative. I think it’s a white monoplane.”

  “Radar?” Boris snapped, turning to Georgy Volynsky.

  “Nothing, Captain,” Georgy said, studying the scope. “But we can’t pick up low-flying aircraft with this old set, Captain.”

  “Sometimes not even low-flying ships or islands,” Boris snorted. And then angrily into the microphone, “Lookout! You think! Don’t you know?”

  “He disappeared into a fog bank, Comrade Captain.”

  “Well, don’t think — know.”

  “Yes, Captain,” echoed contritely from
the speaker.

  And then Boris muttered under his breath, “Maybe those fools of the International Whaling Commission have an air force.” For the first time, Boris saw Kuzma Nikishev smile.

  The captain moved his gaze forward where the great whale lay flaccid in death, waves lapping over its back. The winch began to rattle and the harpoon line went taut. Slowly, the monster was hauled to the starboard side where crewmen deftly secured the carcass to the ship.

  “What now?” Nikishev said.

  Boris gestured to a crewman holding a flensing knife. “That man will cut off the flukes so the whale will tow more easily and he’ll cut three notches in the tail to identify the kill as ours.” The Zampolit nodded. “And that man,” Sinilov said, pointing to a man holding a lance-like harpoon attached to a hose, “will drive his harpoon into the whale. His harpoon is attached to an air hose which is hooked up to our compressor. Then we’ll pump air into the whale and radio Gelendzhik.”

  Then something caught the captain’s eye — a flash of white on the far eastern horizon. He brought his binoculars up, focused, leaned forward, but found nothing but the sun glaring from the sea. He cursed.

  “What is it?” Nikishev asked.

  “Nothing. A flash of white. Must be the sun off the sea. The morning sun can do strange things in these latitudes.”

  The Zampolit pursed his lips. “Fooled the lookout, too.”

  “Can happen. I’ve seen the sun flash green, red, orange.” He shrugged. “I’ve seen whole crews confused. Means nothing at all. Just the morning sun.”

  Kuzma Nikishev nodded and stared at the eastern horizon. He saw nothing but the sun sprayed from the sea like burnished copper.

  *

  Far to the north, the same morning sun stole cautiously through the haze like a thief approaching an unwary victim, slashing the mists shrouding Tagatu Island, one of the most desolate of the Aleutian chain. An uninhabited, bare spit of land located midway between Attu and Kiska, its surface is a sterile moonscape littered with boulders and creased by ravines. Only near the center of the elliptical island is there a level place — a small plateau with patches of muskegrass and a scattering of boulders, splotched with lichens and moss.