The Med

by David Poyer

  The Navy. At nineteen it had meant parades by the Severn, the Ring Dance, forbidden kisses along Stribling Walk. A romantic dream. It was different living it, trying to be a “Navy wife” (how she hated those words) when you were actually single, or worse; something like a legal separation, with visiting rights. Her dreams of a career had vanished; the grimy port cities the Navy based in were far from the action in archaeology. Oh, she stayed busy. Halfway to a master’s, and substitute teaching, and of course her daughter. That helped time slip away when he wasn’t there.

  But she didn’t want time to slip away. She was young, and she wanted life to be as she had dreamed it, romantic and beautiful. Or else professional and fulfilling; her dreams tugged her sometimes this way, sometimes that. So that now, living at least the romantic half of them, she smiled at him in the candlelight, and saw his smile grow, reflecting and then kindled by hers; and knew that to him, she was everything.

  For tonight, anyway.

  “Happy, Susan?”

  She had been, but for some reason being asked if she was, irritated her. She felt her smile fade.

  “Ooooo! Spaghetti!” said Nan, grabbing her silverware. Susan tucked her napkin back where it had fallen, and glanced at Dan.

  “Good—just in time.”

  They plunged into fettuccine alla Romana, side dishes of more pasta, a meat course that she thought looked like flank steak from a squirrel. A little of the festive mood returned as he touched his glass to hers.

  “Aren’t you drinking?”

  “Good grief, Dan, this is my third glass. What are you trying to do—seduce me?”

  He glanced at Nan, who was ogling a passing waiter with wide brown eyes, noodles hanging from her mouth. “If I only had a chance.”

  “If you only did. But I’m married. At least I think so—my husband’s been at sea so long I’m not sure anymore.”

  She regretted her remark instantly, but said nothing to repair it. The silence grew. At last he bit his lips and reached for the carafe. He poured more for both of them, topping the glasses till the wine trembled convex at the very lip.

  “I can’t do anything about that, Susan,” he said at last.

  “I know. I was being bitter. I’m sorry.”

  “Okay now?”

  “Yes. Sure.”

  But that same taut silence kept coming back all through the wine, and what dancing afterward they could snatch before Nan got cranky. As they walked back to the hotel uphill past the shuttered shops, the scents of verbena and roses lying over the cobblestones like fog, he was wondering what to say, and she was trying to be cheerful. But she wasn’t. Nan was whiny, tired, and the first order of business was to put her to bed. When she fell asleep at last, breathing raggedly out of a tear-swollen face, Susan dropped all trying, all effort, and slumped onto the bed. Too much wine had left her feeling dizzy and sad and conscious that she had eaten too much. When he lay down, the bed creaking, and put his hand on her breast she pushed it away. After a moment she got up and went to the window.

  “Babe?” he said, behind her.

  She didn’t answer, looking out at the empty dark beyond the rippled antique glass. When she heard him get up she opened it and went out. The balcony was bare stone, but the climbing roses that seemed to infest Taormina wound over the walls, filling the airless night with sickening sweetness. She leaned down, holding tight to the balustrade, and heard from far below the sigh of waves.

  “Oh,” he said, beside her. “There’s the ship.”

  It was true; they could see it now, out at the edge of the bay. “We couldn’t see it from here yesterday,” she said.

  “Right, she’s upped her anchor.” His voice had changed, become evaluatory and professional; as if, Susan thought bitterly, she was not there at all. “She’s got her running lights on … must be shifting anchorages.”

  “Forget the ship,” she said. “You’re away from the ship. We’ve got two more days away from the goddamned ship.”

  “Susan, come off it. Don’t tell me you’re not enjoying this, touring all over the Med. Lots of wives would kill for this.”

  “Screw them.”

  He didn’t say anything else then. Afraid to, she thought. He’s right. I feel dangerous right now.

  And he was thinking, What is it? Why is she like this, all of a sudden? I was looking forward to this so much … it was so wonderful, last night.…

  They made up somehow, clumsily. She did it against her will, feeling forced to it by the shortness of their time together. But she pushed the resentment down once more. They were kissing at last, alone together above the sea, when something buzzed inside the room.

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know … could it be the door?”

  But when they went in they saw that it was the telephone. She picked it up, listened, then held it out.

  “Lieutenant Lenson. It’s for you.”

  “What? Who is it?” He took the instrument unwillingly, turning a little away from her. “Hello. Yes. Yes sir.”

  She waited, her hand on his arm.

  “Yes sir,” he said again. “Now? I mean—tonight?”

  “Yes sir.” He hung up.

  “What is it?”

  “Jack Byrne. He called from the pier.”

  “How did he know we were here?”

  “We have to leave a number when we stay ashore overnight. You know that, Susan.” He stared at the phone for a moment longer, then started buttoning his shirt.

  “What’s going on?”

  “It’s a general recall.”

  “You have to go back? When?”

  “Right now. Jack says the launch is waiting at the pier. Guam’s underway at the mouth of the harbor, standing by to get us back aboard.”

  “But wait.” She felt the whole structure crumbling; she was still dizzy from the wine. “Where are you going? For how long? Will you be back in?”

  “I don’t know, babe.”

  “What does it mean? Is it a war, or what?” She felt lightheaded, speaking words she was unable to connect to any reality.

  “I just told you all I know. I doubt it’s serious. Probably just a false alarm. Or Ike could be pulling it for drill. We’ll probably be back in tomorrow morning.”

  “But what should I do? Should I wait?”

  “I don’t know,” he said again, and she heard the pain in his voice. “Look … Mrs. Hogan and the other wives are down at the Naxos. Why don’t you move down there with them, and as soon as we know what’s going on, we’ll get a message back to you.”

  “Wait. Wait, Dan.”

  Halfway to the door already, pulling on the one civilian coat he owned, he stopped when he felt her arms around him.

  “Don’t make a scene, Susan. I have to go. It’s my duty.”

  “Duty! That doesn’t mean you—just take off, and leave us here. You have duties to us too—”

  “Susan, they know I got the message. And even if they didn’t, I’ve got to be aboard that ship if she’s going someplace.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I do,” he said quietly, taking her arms. “I do. That’s what I’m here for.”

  She closed her eyes. It was useless arguing with him. Pain and love filled her in quick alternation with flashes of hatred.

  “Hold me, at least, before you go.”

  They hugged in the darkened room. He felt her shoulders move; felt her hair brush his chin; lowered his head, feeling tears burn his eyes. Didn’t she know there was nothing he wanted less to do in the world than leave her and Nan? Couldn’t she know, without his having to say a word, that in spite of all he was, all he had promised, he wanted desperately to stay? But he knew he couldn’t. It would be wrong for him to stay, not when the task force was sailing, and it was not fair for her to make it harder.

  He opened his eyes and stepped back. “Babe … I’ll get a message back as soon as I can.”

  “All right, Dan.”

  “Good-bye.”
r />   She did not answer. He touched her eyes gently with a finger. He had expected tears, but her eyes were dry.

  She stood at the door for a long time after the lock snapped behind him. She was listening to the silence; the distant creak of floors; tick of an old clock; and from the window, soft in the airless night of Taormina, the ceaseless surge and whisper of the sea.

  III

  UNDERWAY

  7

  U.S.S. Guam

  0300: UNDERWAY.

  The ship moved steadily through a dark swell, miles from land; but she was not awake. Three-quarters of her crew were dead in their bunks. Cradled, muttering lost in dreams, they curled unconscious as the unborn within the metal womb that carried them.

  Like the pelagic sharks far below her keel, despite her sleep she swam and dimly knew. Deep in her boiler rooms sweating men labored between tornadoes of oil-fed flame. Her enginerooms were solid with sound, the shafts whirling blurs. Levels above, her senses fingered the darkness, sweeping the surface of the sea and the heart of a clouding sky. Specialists leaned over radarscopes and plots. In radio central the receivers and teletypes hummed and clattered. On her bridge men stared warily into the night, and the captain napped restlessly in his leather chair.

  On the flag bridge, high above the black sweep of the helicopter deck, Lenson balanced his binoculars on the port coaming. The night wind combed his hair, drying the sweat from his forehead. He did not like night watches. He spun the focusing knob, setting it by touch, and lowered his face to peer into the absolute darkness of open sea under overcast.

  Ahead, one point off the port bow, a single dim star rode steady, glittering distant. Bowen, their one remaining escort. She probed an elder realm than the sky, her sonars singing whalelike down into four thousand feet of black Mediterranean.

  Lenson shifted his binoculars, blinking to clear tired eyes. Nothing else marred the invisible sea ahead. Even the huge objectives of the night glasses gathered only a faint gray where the sea broke and sky began. He shifted again, searching aft in bites along the barely visible horizon. There; a second light, low on the dark circle of heaving water … Barnstable County. He watched her for a few minutes, glanced at the amber face of a gyrocompass, and shifted the glasses once more.

  A greenish, faraway spark under the immense dome of sky, the flat bowl of sea across which they crawled … Charleston. She was eight points back, abeam of Guam, the guide and axis of this moving circle of ships. She seemed distant, but the night-steaming plan was a sector formation, each ship roaming within a moving segment of arc, and her radar range was well within its outer edge.

  He shifted. Far astern, the second LST, Newport. He studied her for a long time. Her range light seemed dim. Then it shone out; the ship had yawed, bringing some line or fitting out from between the glowing filament and his distant eye.

  Lenson yawned. The binoculars dangled, their weight digging into his neck after three hours of watch. He turned from the windy night into the red-lit cave of the flag bridge, high in the island above the slow-rolling bulk of the assault carrier.

  Instantly he was surrounded by a small world; the separate, silent, almost holy heart of a ship at sea, a pilothouse at night.

  The flag bridge was thirty feet wide and twenty deep. Around the night-filled windows was a mass of equipment: radiotelephone handsets, gyrocompass repeaters, rudder-angle indicators, status boards, IC phones, all invisible except for pilot lights of red or dim blue. Clipboards and publications had been wedged into their cabling. To the left, under a faint red radiance, a chart table was folded out of the bulkhead. In the center of the bridge the green flicker of a radar repeater picked out the face of a man bending over it. To the right, against the after bulkhead, a sheet of Plexiglas covered with numbers glowed dim as a phosphene; another man stood motionless behind it, sound-powered headset clamped to his ears, a grease pencil tentative in his upraised hand. To the far right was another hatchway, open, but with only night and the rushing wind beyond.

  Lenson paced the narrow aisle before the windows twice, then stopped at the repeater, leaning against it. A flash of white light came from a small room behind the bridge.

  “Quartermaster, keep that curtain closed.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  He leaned without moving for a silent while. A maddeningly deliberate clock, lit amber, shaved thin slices from the night. Since World War II, some detached portion of his brain reflected, the Navy had patrolled this ancient Hell’s Kitchen of the earth. He was the cop on the corner tonight. Did they sleep better at home, knowing these ships were here, that he stood nodding over a radarscope? He doubted it. But here they were just the same, obedient to their word.

  “Everybody in station, Stan?” he asked suddenly.

  Glazer glanced up. His face looked ascetic and gloomy in the verdigris glow of the scan. He stepped back to let Lenson dip his face to the night hood.

  The fluorescent wand of the surface-search radar rotated tirelessly, sweeping across the dark glass that was, to his mind, the Central Med. Here and there were brief sparkles; sea return, the echo of peaking waves. But there were solid pips, too, fading slowly but returned to their hard brilliance moment after moment by the sweep of the scan. Glazer, the junior officer on watch, had drawn each ship’s night-steaming sector on the scope with yellow grease pencil. One glance told Lenson that all units of the task force were in their assigned areas. To starboard, two bright pips showed the remainder of the formation; Coronado; Spiegel Grove. Coronado was at the far edge of her sector, but her captain believed in active patrolling. Every ship had her quirks, her individuality, even on so remote and inhuman a device as a radarscope.

  One station was empty: Ault’s. In the hurry to get underway her captain had taken her across a shoal in the dark. She had reported no apparent damage, but still had hove to, to check out her bottom, once she was clear. She was coming up astern, but at reduced speed. He felt the gap the old destroyer left in their screen as a sheep must the absence of a shepherd.

  His hand felt for the range dial, and turned it up.

  Now the formation itself shrank to the center of the screen. It could be covered by a quarter. The beam swept out fifty miles or more, and he watched it scan around.

  Far ahead, a blurry green smear flared and disappeared at the very limits of the radar’s range. He stared at the blankness where it had been. Several sweeps later it painted again. He ratcheted the cursor for bearing and distance, marked it with the grease pencil, then lifted his head to look at the vertical plot. The messenger of the watch was stroking in characters, printing backward so the men in front could read. As he wrote he began to speak, his voice creeping into the silence, belonging there, like the muffled roar of the wind.

  “CIC reports: Skunk “Oscar,” bearing zero-three-two true, range forty-eight thousand. Course one-five-five, speed ten. Closest Point of Approach; one-one-five, four thousand yards; time to CPA, 0335.”

  “Very well,” muttered Lenson.

  “That him?” said Glazer, sidling over to peer past his shoulder.

  “Yeah,” he muttered, looking off into the darkness. The other ship, twenty-four miles distant, was headed south. Its closing rate, the algebraic sum of both ships’ speeds, and its relative motion would take it across the bows of the formation and through it. It would pass Guam, at the center, two miles to starboard. That would take it between Bowen and Barnstable County, past the guide, into Coronado’s sector and then Spiegel Grove’s … if it didn’t change course. If it was what he suspected, a merchantman or tanker bound for North Africa or Spain, it probably wouldn’t. On the other hand, no naval officer trusted a merchant skipper to do the reasonable thing. The formation had the right of way in this situation, but the possibilities of miscalculation were too great, the consequences too terrible, to take any chances at all.

  He had seen once what could happen. Sometimes, on night watches like this, he could still hear the screams on the wind.

  For just a mome
nt then, remembering, Lenson heard them. He closed his eyes, gripping the pelorus till his fingers cramped, then opened them, driving into them the dim glow of the instruments, the dim deckedge lights, the iron fact that he was on Guam and not another ship that lay now two miles beneath the gray rollers of the North Atlantic. Not now, he prayed. I’m on watch, I have to be alert. As if in answer the screaming waned, grew faint. He stared into the radarscope, breathing swift and shallow, hoping he would not be forced to live it all again.

  Then, as the bow of an aircraft carrier took shape before his helplessly fixed eyes, he knew that he had lost.

  * * *

  Dan, left on the Ryan’s wing, had stood frozen, staring at what had a moment before been empty night. Something seventy feet high had suddenly created itself there, filling half the sky, its running lights burning steady, the cruel gleam of its bow wave sparkling against black. He gripped the splinter shield, unable to move or breathe. Behind him a cry of “Stand by for collision!” was followed instantly by the electric clang of the alarm.

  The Kennedy hit them a hundred feet behind the bridge. The destroyer heeled, knocking him onto the gratings. A terrifying shriek of tearing steel succeeded the blow. The ship whipped and shuddered under him and he hugged the deck mindlessly, binoculars biting into his stomach. The lights of the carrier, penumbraed by mist, slid by high above him. A scream of yielding metal, a roar of escaping steam blotted out the drone of her horn. Something exploded aft, jolting the deck and lighting the sea like sudden daylight.

  He scrambled up and was propelled by the lean of the deck into the pilothouse. He blinked flash from his eyes to find its familiarity changed into something new and terrible. The boatswain was shouting into the 1MC, but nothing was audible above the din. The chart table light flickered and went out, as did the binnacle and the pilots on all the radios. The captain was clinging to his chair, staring out the starboard hatch.