Rage of Battle wi-2

by Ian Slater

  Though already lying practically flat in the bed, Wilkins pushed his head back farther against the bedstead, his feet sliding down under the sheet, eyes staring up at the ancient stone ceiling as if his spirit was willing but the body weak. Rosemary sat awkwardly, impatiently, and glanced at her watch, adjusted it like a bracelet, trying not to be rude. Besides, she wasn’t going out anywhere that evening and had intended to sit up as late as possible in an effort not to think of her appointment with the family doctor in Oxshott in the morning. She was pretty sure she’d missed her period but couldn’t remember exactly when her previous one had begun. Usually punctual about marking it in her diary, she had simply forgotten to note it the last time. Even so, it seemed that it certainly should have begun by now.

  “I could come another time when you’re feeling better, Graham?”

  The name had suddenly come to her, once she realized she was in control of the situation.

  “He’s not my real dad, you see.”

  “Oh — I didn’t realize. Is that — well, of course, I know these things do matter, but is it enough to — what I mean—” Georgina should be here after all, thought Rosemary. It was a job for the psychologists and Freudians or Jungians. Or Shakespeare. “I mean, does that upset you, that he isn’t your real — natural — father?”

  “No.” He plucked another tissue and looked up at the ceiling again.

  “Graham, I think you’re probably very distressed now. Please don’t misunderstand. If you’d like another — that is, I mean if you would like to talk something over with me, I’ll be only too happy to come some other time. Just tell the headmaster—”

  “I saw him, you see.”

  Rosemary’s stomach turned. An extramarital affair. She didn’t want to hear any sordid details. Was that why Wilkins hadn’t wanted his mother there? “Graham, I’m your teacher. I think any family affair — any family matter is best discussed with the school chaplain. If you like, I’d be quite happy to call-”

  The boy looked at her now. “Your old man’s in the navy, isn’t he?”

  She utterly failed to see the relevance of the question but bristled at “old man.” That was callow Wilkins. “No,” she said, outwardly unfazed. “My father isn’t in the navy.”

  “No. I mean your — boyfriend.”

  “Oh!” She still didn’t like the familiarity, but now his question at least made more sense.

  Wilkins was turning gingerly onto his right side, facing her, grimacing, trying not to put pressure on his right elbow. “I was wrong,” he said. She noticed he was perspiring about the throat. “I mean I shouldn’t have…” he continued. “I got drunk, miss, and I was — well, you know. Under a lot of stress. Exams and, well — you know—”

  He was under stress! It was another modern disease-students under stress. What he needed was a good, swift kick in the backside.

  “Sometimes when I get drunk I get, well—”

  “A lot of people get depressed, Graham. Drink or not.” She hesitated but then decided it was better she said it. “But they don’t try to kill themselves. There’s no answer in that.”

  “It was sherry.” He said it as if that were explanation enough. Rosemary said nothing. Was this the answer? Hamlet had drunk sherry? She was sure now that either the boy was somewhat demented, probably as a result of the suicide attempt — either that or—

  “Did you take anything else?” she asked him.

  “Well, some tablets.”

  “What kind of tablets?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you tell the doctor this?”

  “He said they found the bottle. Hal — Hal something.”

  “You mean you just swallow any kind of tablets?”

  He looked straight at her, his face suffused with anger. “What would you do,” he charged, “if—”

  “If what?” she cut in impatiently.

  “Your old man’s a spy.”

  Intuitively she looked about her. “Graham — what are you—” She caught her breath. Of course he understood how serious it was. “Then you should tell someone about it.”

  “I am.” He was staring wildly at her. “I’m telling you.” She heard voices nearby.

  “Me? But you should tell the police — or—”

  “My mum,” he said. “I couldn’t. It’s—” He turned onto his back and slid down farther into the bed. All the color seemed to be draining from his face.

  “Graham — this is a very serious accusation.”

  “You’re telling me,” he said, and in a hoarse voice, which had been caused by the stomach pump tube, he spoke to her and seemed older, wearier, than she. “I want you to tell them,” he said.

  She rose, holding her head with one hand, vaguely aware of clutching her purse with the other. “I—” She stopped, drinking at first the voices were next door, but then seeing it was near 7:00 p.m., she realized it was time for prep in the classrooms below. “Where is your father now?”

  “Stepfather,” he reminded her. “He’s in Southampton today.” A wicked, cynical grin — the kind she’d seen in class before — twisted the curve of his mouth. “Port comings and goings, you see.”

  Rosemary lowered her voice. “Graham—?”

  “I’ve seen the brown envelopes,” he said. “You know— OHMS — On His Majesty’s Service. Nicked from some government offices, I expect. Makes it look all official like — if they were dropped and somebody picked them up accidentally. Full of cash. They’re in a box at home. I know where he hides it all.”

  She was staring down at him, aghast at the enormity of what he was telling her. A man selling port schedules, tonnages, departures, of the NATO convoys to enemy agents. It was unthinkable that an Englishman — and now everything came into focus — the newspapers reporting, as much as they were able, the “in camera” trials of four spies caught in the past month. Some even said the surprise breaching of the Fulda Gap had been aided and abetted by well-organized and pervasive sabotage behind the NATO lines, the SPETSNAZ — Russian commandos, which the Americans called “special forces”—having been sold defense plans by East German spies who had come through to the West in the flood following the opening of the Berlin Wall.

  “I thought,” continued Wilkins, his throat so dry, he could barely talk, “that with your old man, miss — being in the navy and all and — well, I wanted to tell someone.”

  In turmoil but not wanting to panic the boy, she marshaled all the calm that was her teacher’s stock in trade, not letting the class, the world, see inside. Unflappable Rosemary, in Georgina’s absence, keeping the sheer terror of what such betrayal could mean to thousands of British and American seamen on the convoys bottled up inside her. She touched Wilkins gently on the shoulder. “I think it’s pointless of me to say, ‘Don’t worry.’ Of course, I know how you must feel. But, Graham, you mustn’t mention this to anyone until I’ve talked to the authorities. Don’t tell anyone until I’ve come back.”

  “You’ll come tomorrow?” he asked. “Please?” He was like a child again.

  “Yes, I’ll come back tomorrow.” Before she left, she asked him about his mother — about how it was possible that—

  “Mum never asks where money comes from,” Wilkins cut in. “She thinks I hate him anyway.”

  “Do you?”

  He was reaching toward the mobile tray across the bed for the paper cup of water. Rosemary passed it to him.

  “He’s not my dad,” he said. “Not really.”

  Rosemary looked back at him, her hand on the door. “Are you sure of what you’ve told me? That it’s not simply your dislike of your—”

  “He’s not my father. I can show them the money. Everything. But you’ll have to hurry, miss. He could be home by morning.” Rosemary felt her stomach tightening again.” All right. I’ll — I’ll attend to it. Immediately. I promise. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  “Miss?”

  “Yes?”

  His eyes met hers in a look that was unmist
akably sexual. She was shocked. And flattered.

  By the time Rosemary rejoined Georgina, her father, and the headmaster, it was still raining, the wind continuing its mournful wail in the sodden oaks that surrounded the school. With the blackout curtains drawn, the school’s lights seemed strangely dimmer and more depressing than usual. Graciously brushing the headmaster’s apology aside, Rosemary told him she was glad he had called.

  Their feet crunching on the wet gravel as they walked toward the Wolsley, she apologized to Georgina and her father for her “thoroughly foul mood.”

  “All right, Rose,” said Richard. “We’re all under stress these days, I’m afraid.”

  “Yes,” said Rosemary. “We are.”

  Georgina said she didn’t want to intrude, but did Rosemary think the Wilkins boy would try it again?

  “I don’t think so,” said Rosemary. “It was—” She turned around in the darkness, the dim reflections of the slit headlights not enough to illuminate their faces, for which Rosemary was glad. It made her confession easier. “You were right, Georgina. I think he does have what I suppose you would call a ‘crush’ on me, though I blush to admit it.”

  “What?” asked Richard Spence. “At his age?”

  “He’s almost seventeen, Daddy,” said Rosemary.

  Richard mumbled his disapproval, but Rosemary barely heard him. She had far more to worry about than dealing with a schoolboy’s infatuation.

  In the backseat, so dark that the lights of the Audi’s dash seemed far-off pinpricks of light, Georgina tried to imagine what had transpired in the boy’s room. Slipping her shoes off, crossing one foot over the other, and stretching so that her stocking feet were pressing hard on the padded foot bar, she laid her head back on the soft imitation learner, reveling in its smell. Depressing the door lock, her left hand gripping the strap, she slipped her right hand beneath her black pleated skirt and, with the steady hum of the windshield wipers’ rhythm in the background, closed her eyes in the darkness. Dreamily she heard Rosemary asking their father how late the Oxshott police station stayed open at night.

  * * *

  Robert Brentwood knew something the navy never mentioned to the public, not even to the enlisted submariners: that the incidence of men going insane because of depth charge attack was the highest of any group in the armed services. The crack-up following depth charge attacks was not always a sudden madness, a single snapping of nerve, but more a gradual unraveling, like a tight ball of gut slowly but irrevocably undone, strung out, until its ability to spring back was permanently impaired. It made him grateful for, though puzzled by, the number of depth charges that the Roosevelt’s sensors had picked up splashing off the cruiser but which had failed to explode. Had the Russians’ military passion for quantity overwhelming quality meant that much of their ordnance was highly unreliable? If so, Brentwood knew he should get the information to Washington as soon as possible.

  But the Roosevelt could not send a message if it was sunk. He would have to get to Holy Loch. Or had there simply been a miscalculation in the setting of the fuses — which would testify to the efficacy of Roosevelt’s silent running confusing the cruiser’s sonar?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Although he was no longer in the navy, or even on the reserve list, Adm. John Brentwood, retired, felt that his job as one of the managing directors of the New York Port Authority inextricably linked him with two of his three sons and his daughter. The connection with his son Robert on the Roosevelt was obvious to anyone familiar with the U.S. Navy’s “rollover” policy. This “sea lift” of men and materiel to reinforce Western Europe depended heavily on both the day-to-day administration of the U.S. home ports as well as on the protection afforded the convoys by submarines like the Roosevelt.

  It was not a glamorous job at the Port Authority — not much media coverage. It was visual, all right, with the scores of ships passing through, but once you’d shot that, the real bureaucratic work of the Port Authority disappeared into overcrowded offices and banks of computers spewing out availability of loading cranes, tonnage, union liaison status boards, availability of docks, tide changes, and the other thousands of seagoing craft that had to be kept clear of the convoy-marshaling areas, where everything from condoms and microchips to yeast, sugar, and howitzer shells had to be crated, stored, counted, loaded, and transported as fast and efficiently as possible — while at the same time taking care to vary the departure times and convoy routes as much as possible to confuse any enemy sub packs lying in wait in the deep Atlantic trenches off the eastern seaboard.

  It wasn’t glamorous work for John Brentwood and his staff, their responsibilities disproportionate to the pay and the virtual lack of recognition. Yet for every dozen ships they managed to load and send off without a hitch, one mistake could make the news, and if the navy censor cut the story it would quickly get around the docks anyway, making the Port Authority a butt of more jokes about bureaucratic inefficiency.

  One ship, the MV Nagata, a fifty-thousand-ton “Combo” or multipurpose oil/bulk cargo/container vessel, its bridge and stack in a stern housing and co-owned by a Japanese-U.S. conglomerate, was a case in point. The ship left New York harbor as part of Convoy 24 on the night of October 2, bound for Antwerp. Thirty-two hours and 461 miles later, the Nagata was off New England. While maintaining radio transmission silence, she received word from ACLANT— Allied Command Atlantic — that Russian and East German divisions, thrusting west from Hanover and wheeling on Osnabruck, had driven a wedge between the westernmost perimeter of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket and the ports of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Antwerp. While the ports had not yet surrendered, it was believed this would only be a matter of time, so that now the convoys would have to head to Ostend seventy miles farmer west on the Belgian coast, to Dunkirk twenty-seven miles farther south, just over the Belgian-French border, or to Calais, another thirty-odd miles southwest of Dunkirk.

  By this time, the MV Nagata was no longer over the relatively shallow Georges Bank but had passed over the divide between the continental shelf and the continental slope, and was now over the continental rise. In two hours she had passed from water no more than five hundred feet deep to the nine-thousand-foot depths of Heezen Canyon. While their sudden passage from shallow to deep water beneath them was unknown to most of the crew, on the bridge the watch knew, their silence palpable as they waited anxiously to reach the more powerful current of the Gulf Stream. This would aid the thirty-ship convoy as it passed over the undersea mountains that lay before the Sohm Abyssal Plain, where the greatest danger was a submarine that could be lying undetected for weeks, even since before the war started, sonar pulses from any convoy escort vessel looking for subs scattered by the natural obstruction of the undersea mountains.

  Before joining Convoy 24, the Nagata had hauled electronics and assorted containerized cargo from Japan to the United States. But on this trip it was carrying replacement nine-thousand-pound-thrust GE-100 turbofan engines and other spare parts for the close-support A-10 Thunderbolt antitank aircraft, together with a million rounds of thirty-millimeter ammunition for the Thunderbolts’ multibarrel Gau cannon. In addition, its cargo consisted of five hundred MK-84 electro-optically guided bombs, and, in several “dry-maintained” holds, bulk goods and foodstuffs, from condoms and toilet paper to bread mix, flour, yeast, sugar, and freeze-dried combat rations.

  As well as dispersing such cargo throughout the entire convoy so that if one ship was hit, the entire stock of any one item would not be lost, great care had been taken by John Brentwood and his staff with the loading of the bombs and ammunition on each ship. Wherever possible, the 6.06-by-12.19-meter containers of bombs and ammunition had been placed either side of the Nagata’s center line, the containers’ sides almost flush with her gunwales. Some low-flash-point bunker C oil, as well as highly flammable jet fuel, was being carried in wing tanks and tanks at both ends of the segmented cargo space. Oil tanks nearest the stern were well insulated by cofferdams, or double-water
tight bulkheads, against the possibility of fire spreading from engine and pump rooms.

  The Nagata’s problems began as Convoy 24 began encountering increasingly rough seas off Newfoundland. A small fissure had developed at the bottom of the Nagata’s five and six bulk cargo tanks on the starboard side, abaft the starboard beam. Though seawater was coming through and none of the crew could see how long it had been flowing in, it wasn’t viewed by the captain as a major problem as the pumps were easily handling it. However, because of the warm, dry air being continuously circulated throughout the dry bulk cargo tanks and other storage areas to keep dry everything from electronics and ammunition to yeast, a massive oven effect had been created, part of the fissure in the hull having penetrated the starboard walls as well as the bottom of tanks five and six, containing sugar and yeast.

  It was a disaster that any housewife might have predicted but which the New York Port Authority, beset by a multitude of other problems, had, not surprisingly, overlooked. By 4:00 a.m. enough of the huge tanks of damp sugar and yeast had combined in the dry, warm air to create enormous pressures. And by the time the bridge sensed the buckling of the plates under the pressure within the tightly sealed tanks, it was too late; the longitudinal steel stiffeners reinforcing both the inside and outside plates retained their integrity, but the seams were stressed beyond their limit.

  Soon, high-pressure pipes burst and there was a low whoomp from down below in the engine room, the needles of the “explosimeters,” or gas-pressure gauges, for tanks five, six — and now tank four, buckling under the abnormally high “back” pressure of tanks five and six — moved into the red. Then, in the pitch darkness, there was a sound like a rocket taking off, but no flame, as one of the Butterworth fuel tank covers whistled high into the night and everything began shuddering, the Nagata listing hard astarboard, its four tank developing a deck blister on the starboard side of the ship.

  “She’s about to blow!” the starboard lookout informed the master. “Her weight’s shifting like a beanbag.”