by David Poyer
The leading petty officer slid into the room and snatched off his hat. He had on a new set of dungarees and his inspection shoes, shined. Dan told him to sit down. They talked for a few minutes about the broken davit, then he said abruptly, “Isaacs, you ever smoked grass?”
“Nossir, I never done none of that.” He looked frightened.
“Didn’t think so. Don’t worry, nobody’s after you. Anybody you know in the division who does?”
“No, sir. Don’t know no one that does. Sure not in my section. That stuff probably belong to them signalmen; they stay up all night smoking, playin’ cards up in the shack.”
Dan studied the weathered, anxious face, the scarred fingers nervous on the white hat. What was going on?
“Ikey, I need your help. Do you have any problems with the men? Do they threaten you, or anything like that? If so, it’s your duty to tell me.”
“Oh, it isn’t nothing like that, sir. These boys is no angels. They bitch at me, sure, but they don’t mean anything by it.”
“They shouldn’t ‘bitch at you.’ Do they bitch at the chief?”
“No, sir.”
“You’ve got to come down hard on that. That’s why you’ve got those stripes. You write up a man for disrespect, I’ll take him to the captain. When they start losing pay and liberty, they’ll come around fast.”
“Yes, sir, I sure will do that. I sure appreciate your advice.”
“You’re sure no one’s threatened you?”
“Nothin’ like that, sir,” Isaacs repeated, looking at his cap.
Dan gave up and let him go. The next two interviews were no more helpful. Rambaugh had nothing. Pettus said he’d smoked pot in high school but stopped when he got to boot camp.
When the third-class was gone, he glanced at his watch. The odor of cigars, the continual motion of a confined frame of reference were suddenly too much. He decided to skip lunch, skip staring at Packer and Bryce and the others over greasy soup, and went up on deck.
He emerged into a blizzard. Snow clung to his eyelids, flicked by his instantly numbed cheeks without melting. It filled the air like fog, driven horizontally by the wind. Though it was near noon, the sky was almost dark, and between that and the snow he could barely see twenty yards. The bow was a white blur. So was the fantail. The snow whirled beneath the ladders. His bare palms stuck to the rails. He noted, climbing, that the sleet of the night before had frozen to it. He kicked at it, exposing layers, accretions, like a geological formation. There was more on the 01 level, inches thick on the deck, shoaled up in the corners.
A hundred tons … He crossed the Asroc deck, checked the boat. Empty. Ice sheathed the lowering cables like rock sugar on a string. He climbed to the signal shack, looked around the flying bridge, and, on impulse, began climbing the ladder leading up the mast.
Ryan’s mast began as a tubular steel tripod aft of the bridge. The legs joined at the apex to support the air-search radar, a massive curved bedspring affair, the smaller surface-search antenna, and then the meteorological gear above that. Where the legs met was a little platform the electronics techs used to work on the radars. He approached it gradually. The air-search antenna loomed above him, sixteen feet across, sweeping around through the falling snow with a whooshing, whining hum. The rungs were icy and he climbed carefully, hugging them when the ship rolled.
He stopped at the platform and sat with his legs dangling, staring out into the snow. It came from one point, sweeping toward him and then opening out like, he thought, when you drove a car in a snowstorm. Beneath him Ryan plunged and rolled in the confused sea, and he clutched the skimpy guardrail.
Up here, when the wind dropped, he could hear all the sounds of the ship, muffled by the snowfall but clear, individual. Above him, gears ground coffee in the antenna motor. The wind plucked a tarantella in the signal lines and set off firecrackers in the ragged ensign. From behind and below came a breathy roar, and he turned, to see an inky cloud rolling out of the stacks. Talliaferro was blowing tubes. The snow whirled into it and disappeared, swallowed by steam-driven soot. He heard the clack of wipers, a hoarse shout aft, a steady clanging that must be the men chipping ice … all of it clear but faint, faint, as if he were Hans Pfaal, ascending in a balloon. Above him the mast sliced sweeping curves through billions of descending flakes. The motion was eerie. He couldn’t see the sea. Yet its energy reached up through the steel framework, tossing him through the sky, whip-cracking his head on his neck and making him clutch the icy pierced steel with sudden primeval fear.
Below him, the door to the signal shack opened. The signalman stood at the rail for a while, peering around in the blowing snow. Dan watched him. Apparently satisfied he was alone, the sailor took a wad of money from his peacoat.
Dan started to pay attention.
When the signalman—Hedgecock, or was it Saufley?—finished counting it, he peered round again, then opened a box on the rail. He lifted binoculars out and stuffed the cash under the padding at the bottom.
He replaced the glasses, then stood for a moment more, shivering and pounding his hands together, peering about. He cast one glance upward, but Dan, not moving, must have merged with the upperworks.
The signalman went back inside. A poker stake, Dan guessed. He squatted, looking again into the wind. It drove steadily, endlessly out of the east, icy, pitiless. His whole face was numbed now, and he rubbed it with a numb hand, remembering the danger of frostbite. Why had he come up here? He wasn’t sure. Maybe just to be alone for a few minutes.
I better get back on the job, he thought.
He had one boot on the ladder when he was almost startled off it by the foghorn, not twenty feet above. He cowered, kneeling on the slick steel. The sound vibrated in his lungs, battered his brain. When it stopped he listened, thinking of icebergs. An echo should return in fog, warning of white danger. But nothing came back but the rising scream of the wind.
He was getting up again when he saw someone below him. He blinked snow from his eyes and looked again. A bulky figure in a brown leather jacket. Gloves. Khaki.
Bryce.
The exec stood beside the binocular box, looking around the deck. Dan frowned. What was Bryce doing? If the exec looked up, there’d be hell to pay. He hadn’t even thought about getting a mast chit.
A swirl of snow came down just then, hiding them from each other. When it parted again the XO was walking aft, hands thrusting into his pockets.
Dan waited till he was gone. Then he came down, fast but careful. He stood at the base of the mast, panting a little. He looked at the signal shack. He looked at the binocular box.
Then he opened it.
There was nothing under the padding but a few flakes of snow.
* * *
HE had the twelve to sixteen hundred watch, noon to 4:00 P.M. This was the worst day on a three-section schedule, because he’d already stood the midwatch—midnight to four—and would stand the eight to midnight as well, for a total of twelve hours on the bridge out of twenty-four.
He stood it in a daze of fatigue, clinging to the console as Ryan pitched and shook. The captain sat belted into his chair, nodding over a tech manual. From time to time, he’d snap his head up, blink out the windows, and chew Norden out for a slow rudder order. He sounded tired and on edge.
For the first time, Dan heard the keel sonar. It came right up through the steel fabric of the hull, an eerie high note, like whale songs he’d heard on a National Geographic special. It went from tone to tone, eee-EEEE-eee-ooo, trailing off in a supersonic whine that sent a shiver up his back. He imagined it burrowing down from the storm-lashed surface, twisted by currents and inversions, reverberating down, down, down into two thousand fathoms of inky sea. Over and over, every thirty seconds, and always exactly the same.
He wondered what the whales thought of it.
A swell came out of the snow and swept over the foredeck, throwing spray thirty feet into the air as it exploded against the raked face of the gun mount. It rattl
ed against the pilothouse like shrapnel, frozen before it hit. He focused his binoculars on the chain stoppers. Bloch had lashed them down with six-thread, but he could see them shifting as the wave receded, banging off shell-shaped white carapaces. The swell left round chunks of ice big as garbagecan lids stranded in the scuppers. He shivered. Why was it so cold? He suddenly realized that the goddamn pilothouse was freezing.
“Mr. Lenson.”
“Yes sir.” He lowered the glasses, and went over to the captain’s chair.
The skin under Packer’s eyes was puffy and veins showed at the corners. His hands shook as he lighted his pipe. He was spending most of his time up here now, when he wasn’t in Sonar. Dan wondered how long he could keep it up.
“Who’s got the conn?”
“Mr. Norden, sir.”
“What leg are we on? Anybody keeping track?”
“Yes, sir, zero-six-zero, an hour yet to turn.”
Packer stared into the snow. “How’s your junior officer’s journal coming, Mr. Lenson?”
“Uh, not too much done yet, sir.”
“You’re required to complete one lesson a week.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll get on it.”
“How’s that investigation going?”
“I’m still interviewing, sir. Nothing concrete yet. You know, it might not belong to anybody in First Division.”
“I’m aware of that. If you don’t find anything, we’ll go on from there.”
He didn’t know what the captain meant, but it didn’t seem like a good time to ask for clarification. Packer looked like a dog about to bite. Damn it, he thought, brought up from fatigue by a slow anger. When have I had time to do lessons?
The sonar intercom light went on. “Bridge, Sonar. Captain there?”
“He’s listening.”
“Captain, we have Pargo calling us on the ULQ-six.”
“Hand me that mike.”
Dan turned up the speaker of the underwater telephone. A gurgling crackle filled the pilothouse, like a washing machine running very slowly. “Bravo Delta, this is Alfa India. Over.”
“This is Bravo Delta. Go ahead. Over.”
The voice from the submarine wavered and bubbled, each word echoing for seconds before ebbing back into the crackle. “This is Alfa India. Finex run one-four; I say again, finex run one-four; break; interrogative next run; break; how’s the weather up there? Over.”
Packer said, glaring out the window, “Alfa India, this is Bravo Delta. Weather is manageable. Break. Thank you for your services; you are released. Break. Request you open datum on corpen Juliet Lima, speed Mike, depth yellow plus five-zero. Break. We will track you outbound as far as we can. Have a good trip home. Over.”
“This is Alfa India. Roger all runs complete. Understand open datum on course two-three-five, speed one-five, depth four-five-zero feet. Is that confirmed by Charlie Oscar? Over.”
“This is Bravo Delta Charlie Oscar,” said the captain irritably. “You have copied my transmission correctly. Good-bye and thank you for your services. Bravo Delta out.” He handed Dan the mike. “Stupid bubblehead. Did you hear how he just gave away the code? The idea nukes are something special, it cracks me up.”
Packer stared out the window. At last he opened the manual again. Dan went back to the radar.
A shattering clang made him start. Ice showered past the windows, white, frangible. “What the fuck’s going on, Pettus?”
“I sent Hard-on up with a hammer to get some of that off, sir. It’s really building up since the heaters went out.”
“That’s why it’s so cold in here. What’s wrong with them? Are we getting them fixed? How long will they be off?”
The third-class cracked his gum. “Prob’ly for a while. Went belly-up this morning. Snipes say they don’t have the parts to fix ’em. Gonna bring up some of them electric space heaters, plug ’em in.”
“Oh, swell. Look, goddamn it, that’s not a good idea. If we start—”
“Take it easy, Dan,” said Norden. The blond lieutenant looked tired, too. “I gave that order.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“I know how you feel. But let’s not take it out on the enlisted.”
He didn’t answer. He knew if he said anything, he’d regret it. He contented himself with a mental obscenity.
Okay, check the radar. Nothing but sea return. He jerked his head out of it and went to the chart table and stood looking down at a 1:2,000,000 chart of the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans.
Their rectangular track, scuffed and dirty with erasures, was centered in an immense white vacancy. Three hundred miles to the east, the chart was bordered by tiny islands and then the solid mass of northern Norway. Ryan was at the latitude of Malstrom and the Vestfiord. To the south the chart was empty. Nothing in that direction but gray sea for hundreds of miles, till the Faeroes and the Shetlands, then, beyond that, Scotland. To the southwest, Iceland peeped from the corner. And to the north, the Arctic Sea stretched without hint of land till the sea grew solid and the sky reflected the creamy glow of pack ice.
The ship heaved, and he gripped the edges of the table, bending closer. The tiny numerals of soundings shaded from eighteen hundred fathoms at the south edge of their track to over two thousand. Well over two miles deep. Christ, he thought, staring at the tiny half circle that was their 1530 dead-reckoning position. What a godforsaken place.
Suddenly he felt as distant from Susan as if he were en route to another star. He’d thought of their separation in days, and it had seemed eternal. Now he thought of it in miles, and the sum staggered him.
He thought of the size of the earth, the pullulating billions of inhabitants, the rolling miles of ocean. Suddenly the bond between two people, a link insubstantial, immaterial, consisting only of remembered words and unverifiable yearnings, seemed tenuous and unreal. There were so many other men, better (he felt deep in his heart) than he; kinder, more handsome, more intelligent; more loving, and more lovable. How could he hope to hold her through weeks apart, months apart, years before they could be together simply, day to day, as wives and husbands were supposed to live?
Then he remembered that something real bound them now. Incipient, still only half-formed within her, was the supreme proof of love. No matter how long he pondered, there was something about it he didn’t understand. Was it an accident, that as-yet-mindless burgeoning, that secret, silent self-assembling of matter into something capable of awareness? It hadn’t been his intention. Or hers. But did that mean its creation was nothing more than chance, a ball popped at random from the bingo cage of biology?
Were there such things as accidents?
What was he doing here, so far from her?
“Dan,” said the captain irritably, “buzz the wardroom. Tell ‘Fredo to bring me up some joe.”
“Aye aye, sir,” he said, and pulled the phone savagely from the bulkhead.
10
AT 1720—five minutes late—the last man rapped at his door. Dan shuffled the records again and pulled one out. He took a deep breath.
“Come in,” he called.
Seaman Recruit William Lassard hadn’t bothered to change for the interview. He wore his working uniform: heavy, battered boondockers, spattered red and gray and white; denim bell-bottoms, hems dragging at the back, paint-smeared and with one pocket torn half off; denim shirt; black web belt. A leather knife holster dangled from it, the kind the boatswains whipstitched from scrap leather. The letters AMIIGAF were picked out on it with white paint.
“Hey, Ensign.”
“Sit down, Slick.”
The others had looked uncomfortable. They’d sat upright, abashed by the summons to officers’ country. The rigid caste system of the Navy divided four hundred feet of ship into a series of closed societies that interacted only in stylized ways, always with a clear understanding on both sides of which was senior.
Lassard slid into the chair and propped an ankle on his knee. He tossed his cap, not the dixie cup but the black wo
ol watch cap, onto Cummings’s desk. Freckles spattered the bridge of his nose like dripped primer. His hair was shorter than regulation, no more than half an inch long. Though he was pale for a man who worked outside, again Dan was struck by his looks. He had the bone structure of a model or an actor, strong chin, high cheekbones, the symmetrical features that are the key to beauty.
But all was ruined by the eyes. Lassard brought with him into the room a sense both of innocence and barely suppressed violence, an impression that was, Dan thought, not entirely due to his own foreknowledge.
If he was right, this man had tried to kill him.
“Nice digs,” said the seaman, glancing around. “Got your own sink and everything.”
“You could have had a room like this.” Dan opened the folder. “Your combined GCT/ARI is one twenty. There are programs to send enlisted men to Officer Candidate School, the ones with leadership qualities.”
Lassard opened his eyes wide. Dan saw now that there was something wrong about their focus, as if the seaman was looking at something in the room only he could see. “You think Slick Lassard’s officer material?”
“I only said he—I said, you had the potential. Can I bum a cigarette?”
The request seemed to take Lassard by surprise. He blinked, then reached down to fish a pack out of his sock. They were Kools. Dan took one, could not stop himself from checking the end. Lassard looked amused. After a moment, he shook one out for himself.
“You made third-class twice. What happened?”
“You’ve got the record there, boss. Man with your education ought to be able to read.”
“I’d like to hear it from you.”
“Slick had a little run-in with Allen the Wrench. He was LPO then. Got transferred off last year. Then Nigger Baby moved up from second.”
Dan decided to ignore the racist language for now. “What kind of run-in?”
“Allen was ridin’ his shit, man, ridin’ it into the ground. So one night outside the Acey-Deucey, Slick punches his face in. Busts his fuckin’ nose. Then he goes over the hill for a couple months. Cops in Orlando caught him driving without a license. They sent him back under guard when they found Navy ID in his wallet. Then fuckin’ Packer screws him to the wall at captain’s mast. Breaks him to recruit.”
