by David Poyer
“This happened, sir,” he said. It had been the same the night before with Bryce—only worse. The exec had all but accused him of making it up. He flushed at the memory. He’d thought officers told the truth and were assumed to have done so. Another fairy tale bites the dust. But something in Packer’s manner reassured him. “What do you recommend we do, sir?”
“Several possibilities,” said Packer, tamping tobacco with a little tool. “One: I could send off a criminal investigation report. That would probably get us ordered to Reykjavik, have the Naval Investigative Service meet us at the pier. Or they might cancel the tests, send us back to Newport.
“That raises a problem. This is an important operation we’re on. As you know. They’re holding up purchase authorization on this gear till we get back. But CNO might figure the way things are going, fleet discipline requires it.
“But what’ll really happen is, they’ll do the investigation, do the interviews, and finally conclude they can’t tell who was involved. And we can’t punish on the basis of logic alone. So we lose all around.”
“I see,” said Dan. He recognized the captain didn’t like that alternative. He couldn’t see much in it, either. “What are the other possibilities, sir?”
“Well, I have the power, according to the manual, to convene a board and investigate it here.” Packer’s eyes flared into brilliance over the lighter. “That would take time. Chew hell out of the wardroom. But what worries me is, it’d spread the story all over the ship. That could be bad. Considering how much longer we got to go out here. And I don’t think they’d find anything, either.”
“Who would chair that, sir?”
“Probably the XO.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So, bottom line, my recommendation might well be to cool it. Play it close to our chest. Goes without saying don’t repeat this, and it’s a hard thing to say, but—I don’t trust this crew. Their morale, their attitude. Nam’s tearing the Navy apart. I don’t know what’s going to happen to the service.
“But that’s beside the point, we’ve got to live with it. But we’ll put the word out to the wardroom. And all of us will be more careful moving about the decks.”
Dan felt his mind searching cautiously along alternate paths. He recognized that the captain wanted his input. But the decision, like every decision made aboard this steel planet, was Packer’s responsibility in the end. “I don’t know, sir. Seems to me we ought to do something. Otherwise, they might try it again.”
“You think I’m advocating the quietus. I’m not, or at least not for the reasons someone with a cynical mind might think.
“See, if there was no question it was attempted murder, there’d be no hesitation—we’d investigate. But the lifelines were down for repair—they may not have known that. Somebody might have gone back for a smoke and lost their balance on a roll and knocked you over when they didn’t mean to. Could it have been that way? Think about it.”
Dan thought. For quite a while. Finally he said, “I guess it’s possible, sir. Being as truthful as I can. If they were still unused to the darkness, and I startled them doing something back there, it’s conceivable they didn’t mean to force me over the side. But I think they did.”
“I don’t have to tell you, this doesn’t make you look good, either. How long have you been with us now? Eight days? Have you made such red-hot enemies in that short a time?”
“Well, I didn’t think so, sir.”
“And of course none from previous cruises in this case.… No, it’s unlikely.” Packer glanced at the bulkhead. Dan saw he had a compass and rudder indicator there. “I’d hate like hell to break this cruise. It’s not the usual training crapola. You know, Dan, the commodore didn’t think the squadron could sign up for it until I guaranteed him we’d come through. We worked three shifts welding everything back together. Despite what I said about the crew, some of them sweated blood to get us out here. Now, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the Navy, it’s ‘don’t overreact.’ I think an investigation would be overreacting on this one.
“Ben says he asked you to write out what happened, a statement.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Got it done?”
“Just about, sir.”
“Make it brief and factual. It if says basically what you just told me, I’ll file it by message and tell the squadron staff what’s going on. If they want to overrule me, so be it.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“But—but—only on the condition that you have no bellyache about it. Because if you’re right, you’re the one who’s at risk.”
“I guess I’ll sign up for that, Captain. If you think that’s the best thing to do.”
“That’s the spirit. Whatever, I agree with you on Lassard. I don’t care how shorthanded we are, we’ve got to bottom-blow that bastard. He’s off Ryan the minute we hit port. Administrative transfer, if nothing else. Christ, I’m glad we didn’t lose you, though.”
“So am I, sir.”
Packer got up. “Okay,” he said, slapping Dan’s back. His hand was solid but his gaze was already long, as if he’d already dismissed him; as if he were looking through the steel into the sea. Turning his head, Dan saw that, yes, the captain was looking out the porthole at an approaching squall. “You did right to come to me on this. Let me have that statement as soon as you get it fixed up, okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
* * *
OFF watch. He paused inside the starboard breaker, looking out. Sixteen hundred, and already it had been dark for an hour. The foul-weather jacket Chow Hound Cummings had issued him was snug, his gloves warm, but his face was stiffening after only a few minutes in the open. According to the chart, they’d be crossing the Arctic Circle the next day.
CZ op area Kilo was even farther north, within the dotted line in the Polar Atlas that meant drifting ice.
Originally open to the weather, the breaker—the section of main deck to port and starboard below the pilothouse—had been half-walled with quarter-inch plate during one of Ryan’s past transmogrifications (Transmongrelifications, he thought). In bad weather it offered little more than shelter from the wind. He glanced around it, stamping his feet as the icy steel siphoned warmth from his toes.
It looked as if Pettus’s guys had gotten to red lead, then stopped. The half-finished patches glowed faintly in the side wash of the port running light. Flicking on the flashlight he carried now around the clock, he glanced behind the stringers for tools or paintbrushes. Good, he thought, I’m getting through to them at last.
The ship rolled as he emerged from the breaker, going aft. The spray and the wind hit him at the same moment. He skidded in the darkness, the hard leather soles slick on pebbled ice, and grabbed wildly for the rail. Even through the glove, it was like grabbing a bar of solid cold. He stared downward at the faintly glowing sea, trying to master his fear.
Here, halfway down the length of the ship, the bow wave left at fifteen knots a five-foot boundary of smooth water, at least in troughs; when the sea crested, it climbed straight up the hull. He pointed the light down at it. Directly below him, a discharge spewed water in a steady arc. Where the hull met sea, the green churned into white. He couldn’t see past the layer of bubbles. The sea was dark, and not only with night. It was murky, opaque. He raised his eyes to where the horizon ought to be. But there was only the Arctic night, the Arctic blackness, till the icy wind melted it and it ran across his vision mixed with salt tears.
What had it been like to explore these seas, not with the vibrating rail of a destroyer under one’s hand, but the ice-crusted rope of a sailing ship? To an old frigatesman or whaler, Ryan would have been enormous, palatial. And they’d done it with no heating, poor food, no power but the wind; unable, under these impenetrable clouds, even to know their position within a hundred miles.
He flicked the light around suddenly, and lit an empty port side. Below it was the faint charcoal line of the propeller guard. Then the sea obliterated
it. He looked away and pushed himself off the rail.
Usually in the evening, men stood along the lifelines, smoking, shooting the bull, or simply staring down at the passing sea. Tonight he was alone. Too frigging cold, he thought. Might be one or two in the lee. He thought of checking the Asroc deck but decided not to. Most of that was Reed’s, anyway. All that was his was the boat. And he knew who’d be there.
The kinnicks: Lassard, Gonzales, Greenwald, Coffey. Sometimes Lonnie “Brute Boy” Connolly, one of the new draft of Cat Fives, obese and slow-witted. What the hell did kinnick mean? He’d figured out why they’d been smoking cigars at GQ. I ought to check the whaleboat, check they’re not smoking it up there right now, he thought again, stopping short and looking once again down into the sea. But again he didn’t.
Are you afraid to? he asked himself.
The stern was deserted in the gloom. He walked quickly round it, following the beam of his light, splashing through slush that had accumulated in the dented plates. The lifeline was up and taut. He checked that the pins were in and seized with wire. He kicked the lashed-down flagstaff, checked the chocks and bitts, then headed forward along the port side. He glanced up, to see a shadow looming over him. The flash showed him Vogelpohl, the lookouts’ earphones clamped to his round head. The departmental yeoman blinked in the sudden light.
As he’d expected, a few men were loafing in the lee of the deckhouse, cigarettes glowing. They stopped talking as he approached, withdrawing, with the slow, ostentatious obedience of sailors complying with stupid orders, their arms from the upper lifeline and their feet from the lower. The sweep of his light showed him pallid, unfamiliar faces: snipes, boilermen or enginemen, from the chthonic regions where Talliaferro reigned. Jesus, he thought, looking at their soaked T-shirts. There must be a hundred degrees’ difference between where they worked and this open deck, more if you counted windchill.
“Evening,” he said.
“H’lo,” said one of them. The others waited till he was past, then leaned back on the lines.
Fire station. Hose stowed, nozzle free of crud and ice, turns off and on by hand, spanner wrench in its bracket. Hatch to paint stowage, dogged and locked, gas flood lever sealed, pressure gauge in normal limits. His light waned to a ruby spark as the batteries chilled. A white figure approached, carrying something beneath its arm, like the ghost of Anne Boleyn. As it cleared the breaker a gust snatched away its hat. The cap blew free of the ship, settled, then was caught by the wind and whirled out into the darkness with dizzying speed. The messman ducked his head and continued aft, clutching the sack of garbage against the wind’s claws.
His light died. God, he thought as he undogged a door, as ice fell crackling from the gaskets, How much colder will it get north of here? Will we see the sun at all?
His stateroom was hot and humid as saturated steam. He stripped off jacket and gloves in the sweltering dark and was unbuttoning his shirt when Cummings sneezed from what seemed to be his assigned station aboard ship, his bunk. “God bless you,” Dan said.
“Uh. That you, Lenson?”
“Yeah.”
“Careful getting into your rack.”
“Huh?”
“You got a present. Look before you leap.”
He pulled himself up and banged the reading light. It buzzed and flickered and came on.
His bunk was filled with tools. Rusty scrapers, wire brushes, a ball peen, a two-foot length of wire rope, paintbrushes wrapped in paper towels but still bleeding red orange. He snatched them off the sheet, but they left a lurid stain. Beneath was a dustpan heaped with plain trash: cigar butts, Snickers wrappers, empty cigarette packages, a snuff tin.
“Where the fuck did all this shit come from?”
“Santa Claus.”
“I’m serious. Who put this crap in my rack?”
“Well, he’s short, and blond, and wears two silver bars.”
“That bastard,” Dan muttered. His fartsack was covered with rust and oil. “I got to sleep in this. Norden did this? That shitheel.”
So that was why there wasn’t anything left in the breakers. He felt his face go wooden. Suddenly, decisively, he pulled a towel out of the nest of pipes and began tossing things into it.
The chiefs’ lounge was full of men waiting for evening chow, but Bloch wasn’t there. He went through it, heedless of their looks, into the bunkroom, expecting to find him whittling. He wasn’t there, either, but his rack was. Dan unrolled the towel over it. The tools made an unholy clatter; the brushes smeared orange like a hunter’s coat. There, he thought viciously. Shit flows downhill? I’m not on the bottom anymore.
“Mr. Lenson? Lookin’ for me, sir?”
Bloch stood behind him, bald head wet, belly bulging over a bath towel. His shoulders were blue with faded designs. His eye went past Lenson, and instantly registered understanding.
“Get that crap out of my rack, Ensign.”
“I told you about getting loose gear cleaned up after work.”
“Get it out of my rack! It doesn’t belong there.”
“Put it in the petty officers’. Lieutenant Norden put it in mine.”
“No, that game stops here,” said Bloch. He stood without moving, an overweight, aging man with faded tattoos, in a towel. “Move it. Sir. Now.”
He understood then that he was in the wrong, though he didn’t know why. For Norden to do it to him was, apparently, all right. For him to do it to Bloch wasn’t. And worse, he couldn’t make Bloch accept his wrongness. His mind cast desperately for a compromise, but there was none.
“Fuck it,” he said to Bloch’s hard eyes, his sagging cheeks. His voice began to tremble. “Call Isaacs down to get it. I don’t care. You clean it up!”
At the realization that he was shouting, a deadness clamped itself suddenly across the poles of emotion. He felt his mind separate; the rational observing part of it drew back and his body coasted free, weightless. His throat hurt. He turned and walked toward the door to the messroom, expecting, as he crossed the threshold into the waiting eyes, the clang of a thrown hammer; but from behind him, from all around him, there came no sound at all.
8
Latitude 67°–18′ North, Longitude 0°–31′ West: Operating Area Kilo, Norwegian Sea
“… AND get the filters in early; filter-cleaning shop will close at noon.”
The line of bored and hostile faces swung toward him and away, greenish and ashen under the fluorescent light. He swallowed nausea, looking down again at his wheel book. “The following is a message from the Captain.
“At dawn today, we will have steamed three thousand five hundred miles since passing Brenton Light. Despite bad weather and mechanical difficulties, Ryan continues to meet the demanding requirements of this special operation.
“Captain Packer asked the officers to pass his congratulations on to you, the crew. The number-one ship in the number-one Navy in the world can continue her long record of outstanding performance only as long as you perform with professionalism and excellence. He has every confidence that when we steam home past Point Judith, we’ll do so with the good feeling that comes from having done our duty well and faithfully.”
Boredom and cynicism hung in the air like the smell of damp, unlaundered clothing on unwashed men. He turned to the silent figure beside him. “Chief?”
“That’s all.”
“Any questions? Okay. Carry out—” A hand jiggled over the back row. “Lassard.”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday, Ensign. We doin’ so outstanding, you gonna give us the day off?”
He glanced at Bloch, but the chief’s face gave him nothing back. “Well—I’ll check. But I wouldn’t expect it.”
“The other divisions got it off.”
“I said I’ll get back to you on that.”
“Okay, then. See what you can do, Ensign.”
The men around Lassard snickered. Bastards, Dan thought. He said angrily, “That’s all. Carry out the plan of the day.”
The f
ront rank returned his salute sloppily. The rest made tentative motions toward their caps, or simply broke into a drifting mass headed for the doors at either end of the passageway. The petty officers moved in like border collies, cutting them out and assigning the day’s work.
The day’s work, he thought. It wouldn’t be dawn for hours, and some of them would be up past midnight. Anger struggled with pity as he watched them. The captain’s gung ho pat on the back, passed on by Bryce at officers’ call, might go down with the snipes, the signalmen, the electronic technicians—sailors with pride in themselves, their work, and their ship, old as she was. But the deckhands had listened with the glazed eyes of slaves commended by Pharaoh. The deck apes were at the bottom of the pay and pecking order. A recruit assigned to First Division tried to get out as fast as he could, striking for gunner, personnelman, quartermaster. The ones who failed stayed, scraping rust, putting their backs to a line, or standing for hours behind binoculars in sleet or rain. They had no illusions about “professionalism.”
To make it worse, they were desperately overworked. They stood bridge and lookout watches, six to eight hours a day of wrestling the wheel or shivering on the main deck. In this constant spray, they had to grease the deck gear daily, wipe down bulkheads, check the securing lines rigged against the sea, lay sand and salt to keep the ice down. All of it was labor-intensive, on a ship built when labor was cheap. There was still more to do inside. Norden (direct from Bryce, Dan was sure) wanted the boatswain’s locker and paint locker cleaned and painted out. The latest was an order to paint the bullnose blue, as tradition required north of the Arctic Circle. Dan shuddered. Half the time now, it was underwater.
If I had the assigned complement, he thought, forty instead of twenty-six, we might stay abreast. But his guys were putting in sixteen, eighteen hours a day, and the cramped berthing and unceasing motion were probably making what rest they got more like a dream-deprivation experiment.
He had no sympathy for the kinnicks. They were bad apples. But even the good men were being worn down to carelessness and apathy by chronic fatigue. He didn’t need a leadership manual to tell him that was dangerous.
