The Circle

by David Poyer

  Ryan curved round Calloosahatchee’s stern in a mile-wide circle, then steadied up on a parallel heading. Her motion changed to a pitch that from time to time rolled, too, throwing him against the lifelines. She slid gradually into position a thousand yards astern of the oiler, offset slightly to port. Despite the failing light, he could see the rounded stern clearly, the black letters of the oiler’s name. He wondered what a calloosahatchee was, and who made up these crazy names. Along Ryan’s starboard side, the deeper ship’s wake was a streak of foam over a gentled sea, as if she crushed down the waves as she passed.

  A red and yellow flag snapped abruptly open at the oiler’s yardarm. The intakes whooshed and whined above him and Ryan leapt forward again. He saw Evlin and Packer leaning over the splinter shield. Evlin had his binoculars on the tanker. Packer turned aft, searched the deck, then saw him and cupped his hands. But what he called was lost on the wind.

  “Say again, sir?” Dan shouted.

  “… Word, you ready down there?”

  “Ready, aye, Captain,” shouted Bloch.

  Ryan closed and the tanker grew. Then, suddenly, they were no longer behind it but alongside. He stared across a rushing river of sea to her. He could see men moving about, could make out the expressions on their faces. The oiler’s deck was a mass of piping, valves, hoses. It looked more like a refinery than a warship. She moved to the seas in a slow, majestic seven-second roll, showing twenty feet of her copper-colored bottom.

  He glanced back at Bloch. Shouldn’t they be doing something? But the chief stood with hands on hips, riding with the motion, the straps of his life jacket cutting grooves in his paunch.

  The engines whined again. Ryan surged ahead, and the illusion of motionlessness was broken. He caught Packer’s voice, followed by the engine bell. The destroyer drifted back slowly. The bell pinged again, and she stopped, settling in as if welded to the oiler by an invisible bar of steel.

  Dan sucked air uneasily, chilling his tongue. He couldn’t feel anything in his hands. He plunged them into his pockets. The wind was freezing.

  Now he could tell the ranks of the men opposite. Hundreds of miles from land, the two ships were barreling along only a hundred steps apart. The seas roaring in from ahead were trapped between the parallel hulls. The bow waves, meeting, battered upward into concave peaks that were somehow familiar. Then he had it: a Japanese print, the kind with volcanic islands and monks on rafts. The sea had the same flamboyant elaborations as the wind shredded the crests in its teeth.

  They were still too far apart. The book said 140 feet was best for the span-wire method, with 180 maximum. It looked like more than that to him.

  “On the Ryan: Stand by for shot line forward,” crackled a bullhorn from the oiler. A whistle blew, and a man in a red helmet raised a rifle. Beside him, Isaacs slapped his pockets suddenly, found his whistle, and replied. The rifle recoiled; a faint pop floated past on the wind. The men around Dan ducked for cover. The dart detached itself from the sky and arched down, spinning out an orange spider thread.

  It dropped across the forecastle, tangling itself in the lifelines. Pettus ran forward and came back holding it carefully aloft. Curved by gravity and wind, it hung in a long, fluttering arc back across the rushing sea to the oiler’s midships station.

  “On your feet! Get off those lifelines! Lazy, lay-down fuckheads!” shouted Rambaugh. His corncob hung empty. Dan smiled to himself. “Popeye.” He even trailed his curses off into a mumble.

  The men forward of the fuel trunk got up, rubbing their hands and clapping their arms. Pettus reeved the string through the snatch block on the bulkhead and passed it to the first linehandler, who began hauling in, passing the end to the next. At first, it looked comical, a dozen sailors gravely hauling in a piece of what looked like wrapping twine, but then he saw a heavier piece of line coming over.

  A still-heavier rope followed; then, making the linehandlers show their teeth, a heavy steel span wire. The scarred metal gleamed dully as red work lights flickered on. Behind a shackle were taped three lighter lines, two of them insulated wire.

  The men hauled in steadily, grunting at the weight. The shackle was almost to the ship when one of them slipped and knocked down a companion. The line ran through their hands with startling swiftness, and several men cried out in pain. The shackle dipped into the running sea. He started forward, but before he could think what to do, Pettus had belayed the line around a cleat. The runout stopped.

  “Mr. Lenson!”

  The captain on a bullhorn, depressingly loud. He raised his head over the grimaces and curses of the handling party. One man, gloveless, was leaving it, fighting his way back along the narrow deck. His face was pasty, eyes wide. The flesh of his out-thrust hand opened like a scarlet tulip.

  “What’s going on down there? Get that span wire inboard.”

  “Sir, we—” He stopped himself. “Aye aye, sir.”

  He turned to Rambaugh, but the second-class was already shouting the rest of the handlers back on the line. They stared glumly at the wire, which was skipping and slicing through the water, and rubbed their hands on their trouser legs. The gnomelike petty officer waited till they had a good grip and were taking a strain.

  Then he flipped it free in one motion from the cleat. The weight of it took the ranked men aback. They skidded forward, boots grating over the deck in a grim tug-of-war with the sea. Then they recovered, setting their feet, and brought it in slowly again, hand over hand.

  When the shackle came aboard, Rambaugh stepped in and quickly stripped off the light lines and wires. There were phone lines from the oiler’s bridge to Ryan’s, from the refueling station to theirs, and a manila remating line for hauling across the hose and for retrieval of the shackle when refueling was complete. Rambaugh gave the phone lines to Connolly and Gonzales, who made off with them at a run. The remating line he made fast to a three-horn cleat.

  The shackle came to Isaacs’s big hands. The black first-class’s knife flashed as he cut it free from the rope messenger. He laid its open O in the pelican hook above the fuel trunk. Or tried to. But there was still strain on the line. Ryan was rolling now, away from the oiler, outboard. Isaacs fought to hold the open shackle, waiting for her to come back.

  It happened too fast for Dan to say anything or even flinch. The men slacked off. The shackle wrenched loose and jerked out three feet, twisting so savagely it threw Isaacs’s hands off. A glint of metal flew free, then vanished into the boiling green that bulged and sucked on the far side of the lifeline.

  “Lay back, there, goddamn it! Get your backs on that line!” shouted Rambaugh in his high voice. The party, looking scared now, hauled away at the same moment the destroyer rolled to starboard. The shackle leaped inboard and slammed into the bulkhead so hard it threw sparks. Isaacs jumped on it, wrestled it over the pelican hook, and flipped up the bill. He pushed up a keeper to lock it. At the same moment, Rambaugh was reeving the messenger rope, now become the remating line, through a pair of blocks below the shackle. The end of that line went forward through the hands of the hauling party.

  Dan followed it intently, hands deep in his pockets to keep them from going from tingling to numb. Isaacs’s face had tightened. He was still holding the keeper closed with one hand, gesturing urgently with the other. His voice came faintly over the roar of turbines, the whine and clatter of two ships now, the moan of the wind.

  “Whassat, Ikey?”

  “The pin, Baw. I lost the pin.”

  Rambaugh whirled and stamped the deck. “The keeper pin. He dropped it overboard.”

  “Holy fuck,” said Pettus.

  Isaacs was staring over his shoulder, watching the ships roll together. In a moment they would be rolling apart.

  Rambaugh snatched at his belt, came up with a fid. It went an inch into the hole and stuck. Dan searched desperately through his own pockets: coins, a government-issue ballpoint, keys. He looked at Bloch. The chief stood still, his arms folded over his belly. He was watching the
first-class, who stood frozen, still holding the hook closed with a big hand. “Tool kit,” Rambaugh was shouting. “Where’s the gawdamned tool kit—”

  Dan glanced at the bridge wing. Packer and Evlin were inside; apparently they thought the lines were mated.

  When he looked back, Isaacs was still holding the keeper in place. But Pettus had the tool kit open. Rambaugh, working fast, hacksawed the handle off a screwdriver, thrust it through the keeper, and seized it in place with wire.

  He danced back, showing a fist to the rigging party. They staggered backward, slacking off, panting and blowing clouds of gray fog.

  Now things were happening on the brightly lighted decks across from them. Four huge loops of black hose uncoiled downward along the catenary of wire. The refueling rig terminated in a steel penis seven inches in diameter and four feet long. The coupling crept out, paused, jerked forward a few more feet. Then it stopped, swaying violently beneath the span line.

  Dan saw why. The span was too long, the wire too slack. For the fitting to proceed farther, it would have to slide uphill. At least part of the time. Both ships were rolling, but when Ryan rolled to port, like as not, the oiler was rolling to starboard. When they went in opposite directions, the line leapt to a sudden dreadful tautness. When they rolled together, it dipped like a cheese slicer into the rushing sea.

  He stared helplessly at the men opposite. Clustered together, they seemed to be discussing the situation. The oiler’s phone talker nodded his head and bent to his mouthpiece.

  A larger-than-usual wave, trapped by the parallel hulls, swept in. It burst over the riggers and linehandlers in a head-high wall of spray and solid water. Dan grabbed for the lifeline just before it hit.

  The sea was icy, breath-stopping, incredibly cold. It punched him casually back against the deckhouse, then swept aft, subsiding as it passed the Dash deck. Around him, men wiped ocean from their eyes, cursing hopelessly. A spark of anger ignited in him, like a welder putting flame to his torch. What the hell was Packer doing?

  “We too far away, sir,” Isaacs bawled respectfully in his ear, making him wince. He nodded, agreeing, but not knowing what the first-class wanted him to do about it.

  A few minutes passed during which nothing much changed. The night grew darker. The ships plunged on, the gunmetal waves swept by. Two more seas swept the starboard side. His teeth began chattering. The linehandlers talked angrily. One or two spat and swore in sudden outbursts. The petty officers stood looking toward the oiler, poised on the balls of their feet.

  “Mr. Lenson.” That damned bullhorn!

  “Yes, sir!” he howled.

  “What’s the holdup now? Get that hose across!”

  He stood impotent, looking upward with his hands spread.

  Bloch moved then. He shoved his helmet back and stepped up to the remating line. He put his hands on it and looked over his shoulder. “Linehandlers.”

  “Yo, Chief!”

  “We got to haul that sumbitch uphill if we want a drink. Let’s give it another try. Less you want to stay out here all night.”

  The men knuckled saltwater from their eyes and adjusted their gloves and took determined hold of the line. Water flowed in vees around their boots as they pawed the steel deck. And not only water; Dan saw with a sick feeling that a skin of ice was forming, too.

  “Haul!”

  They laid back with little moans, with sucked gasps of breath. The line to the dangling probe lost its slack, then went taut. The metal phallus resisted, at the bottom of a dip, then came forward suddenly fifteen feet as the span wire assumed that frightening instantaneous straightness. Then it moved back five feet. The hauling party, cursing fearfully, their boots sliding on wet steel and foam, grunted and set their backs again.

  They worked it ten feet closer, lost five, regained seven, lost four, regained three. As the probe moved out from the oiler, the heavy, stiff black hose unbent behind it in loops, like cold garden hose hanging from a wash line. Then it stuck again. It dangled, swaying above the rushing sea, its single aperture staring at them with thirty feet yet to go. It looked even more penislike from this angle.

  He grabbed Isaacs’s shoulder. The first-class’s face was wet and glum. Under the sheen of water was unshaven beard. “Ikey, what’s the goddamned problem?”

  “Can’t get the probe inboard, sir.”

  “I see that, but why not?”

  “Told you, sir. Ships’re too far apart.”

  “Can’t we put more men on the line party?”

  “That’ll get us another two feet maybe. No, sir, captain’s just sheering off too far.”

  “Well, what do we do?”

  “Somebody got to tell him, sir.”

  “Tell him? You mean Captain Packer?”

  “Yessir.”

  They stared at each other for a moment. Then, behind him, he felt a hand on his life jacket.

  “Let me by you, there, Ensign.”

  The heavy figure shoved crabwise past the linehandlers and disappeared up the bridge ladder. Bloch was gone no more than a minute. When he reappeared, he went directly to his post and stood there, face unreadable, watching Ryan’s bow.

  It wavered, and drifted right.

  Very slowly, they nudged closer to the gray wall across from them. The distance flags crept inboard, snapping like firecrackers: 240 feet, 200, 170, 150, 120.

  “Holy hell,” muttered Pettus.

  The sea increased its rage as iron walls closed on it. Dan edged back, away from the lifeline, till his back bumped the cold steel of the deckhouse. The gray bulwark came nearer, towering over them. He could have tossed a baseball up to her deck. He could see the wrinkles around the men’s eyes opposite him. Like a river in flood, lacking only dead trees, the sea between the racing hulls raged and foamed, here and there extruding itself in transparent lens-like bulges, like cast bottle glass.

  He remembered suddenly that in close proximity the Bernouilli effect took over. The two hulls were sucked together, more violently the closer they approached. That was why Packer had held off, played wary.

  If the steering gear went again, as it had coming out Newport channel, they’d be raked down the side of the larger ship before the helmsman could react.

  Lenson rounded abruptly on the line handlers. Their faces were pallid in the scarlet light. He caught Lassard’s insolent smile at the end of the line. “Haul now, haul, you bastards!” he screamed.

  The gaping sailors bent to the line again. It glistened, and he realized it was glazed with ice. Their gloves scrabbled over it. But the oiler’s winches had taken in on the span wire as Ryan closed. The connector came down it in a rush and clanged into its receiver like a bulldozer hitting a concrete wall. In an instant, Pettus and Rambaugh had lashed it with jigger tackles and riding lines. The engineers were guiding the couplings together and locking them.

  When the operating lever was swung over, they stood back and looked at the completed connection, panting out steaming clouds that the wind snatched instantly away.

  Dan turned to the bridge, and cupped his hands. “Ready to pump,” he shouted.

  * * *

  THE oiler’s pumps thrust Navy standard fuel oil across at several hundred gallons a minute. The only sign of it was a drip from the coupling and a faintly obscene pulsing in the hose. At thirty-four minutes from start pumping, Ryan’s signalman circled his amber wand for blow-through.

  Dan was freezing. Air temperature was forty degrees, but the windchill had turned the outer layers of his wet clothes to sheet ice. He crackled when he moved. The line handlers had taken shelter inside, but he stayed on deck.

  Finally the command came to break away. He’d hoped the rest would go well. But something went wrong on the uncoupling—he couldn’t see what—and a great gush of black oil burst out as the hose came free and flooded aft, running down the side of the ship. It ebbed after a moment. Rambaugh dashed sand on it from a bucket. The others continued the breakaway. The nozzle rolled back up the span wire, tensi
oned by the oiler’s winches, still peeing a thin stream of fuel that the wind separated into drops. Rambaugh tripped the pelican hook and threaded an easing-out line through the shackle. Bloch and Pettus kicked it overboard, paid line till it was ten feet from the ship, then let go.

  The span wire jerked evilly, lashed out left and right as the men jumped back, and slashed its way down into the sea.

  “Now secure the underway replenishment detail. Set the normal underway watch.”

  He was unlacing his life vest with numb claws, looking forward to hot coffee like the possibility of salvation, when Coffey said, the shade of a smile on his face, “Ensign, they says that your presence is requested up to the bridge.”

  6

  WHEN the chewing-out was over and they secured from replenishment, he stayed on the bridge for watch. He was frozen and exhausted, and two more hours on his feet didn’t help. Near the end of it, Norden joined him on the wing. Together they stared into the darkness.

  “Jeez, getting cold. Anything out there?”

  “No, sir. Not a thing.”

  “Where’s the oiler?”

  “Off the scope an hour ago. Headed south.”

  “Uh-huh. Look, I wanted to ask you—you mind taking eight o’clock reports for me tonight?”

  Dan said, “Sure,” but he felt like a child who’s had his birthday cake recalled. For two hours he’d been dreaming of his rack. After a moment, he added, “What’d you think of the replenishment?”

  “Not an inspiring performance.” Ryan rolled, and they both gripped the bulwark. The cold wind buzzed in a metal fitting like a trapped wasp. “I was just talking to the XO about it. Or rather, listening. I understand he gave you an earful, too. All in all, I think it ranks as a fiasco.”

  “It wasn’t our fault. The captain was too far from the oiler.”

  “Goddamn it, Dan, you don’t snuggle up to twenty thousand tons of tanker in seas like this.”